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The role of a natural language conversational interface in online sales: A case study. (English) Zbl 0981.68537

Summary: This paper describes the evaluation of a natural language dialog-based navigation system (HappyAssistant) that helps users access e-commerce sites to find relevant information about products and services. The prototype system leverages technologies in natural language processing and human-computer interaction to create a faster and more intuitive way of interacting with websites, especially for less experienced users. The result of a comparative study shows that users prefer the natural language-enabled navigation two to one over the menu driven navigation. In addition, the study confirmed the efficiency of using natural language dialog in terms of the number of clicks and the amount of time required to obtain the relevant information. In the case study, as compared to the menu driven system, the average number of clicks used in the natural language system was reduced by 63.2% and the average time was reduced by 33.3%.

MSC:

68U99 Computing methodologies and applications
68T50 Natural language processing
68U35 Computing methodologies for information systems (hypertext navigation, interfaces, decision support, etc.)
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