Personalized Conversational Case-Based Recommendation

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~cindi/papers/ewcbr.pdf

This is a foundation document that the authors (Goker & Thompson) published back in 2000 and has been referenced by them, and others, multiple times over the years.

The team built a recommender system that featured a conversational approach to a personalized recommendation - in this early case, a restaurant choice. The system was know as the Adaptive Place Advisor.

This research was funded by an automotive company, so we shouldn't be surprised that the target user is busy driving a car. The interactive user interface uses voice prompts and voice responses. The system gets to know the user over time and has the goal of not only providing agreeable restaurant choices but an improved user experience over time.

An examples of how the system adapts to the user: The system will delay the repeated recommendation of the same restaurant, even if the user likes the recommendation - the thought being that even if you like cheap Mexican food, you probably don't want to hear about Poncho's every day.

It's a good reference that addresses many of the issues of building this kind of recommender.