Intelligent E-Commerce with Guiding Agents Based on Personalized Interaction Tools

This chapter presents an agent-based interface for business-to-customer (B2C) applications that is not merely reactive to some user request, but proactive and capable of engaging in a goal-directed conversation with the user, e.g. by taking the initiative to recommend new products. The approach combines content-based filtering, where user profiles are generated based on content features extracted from documents that users find relevant, with collaborative filtering which clusters users according to their expressed taste to generate recommendations within these virtual communities. In addition, the naturalness of interaction, especially for casual users, is enhanced by appropriate 2D and 3D animations that express the agent’s emotional reactions.