Ontology-Based Natural Language Processing for In-store Shopping Situations

Natural Language communication between customers and products within in-store shopping environments enables new forms of product interfaces and an improved filtering and intuitive presentation of product information. In this article, we describe how customer´s access to product information at the point of sale can be improved through the use of dialogue systems and heterogeneous web-based representations of product information based on formal ontologies within in-store shopping environments. After considering specific requirements of in-store shopping environments on dialogue systems, we present the model of a Conversational Recommendation Agent (CoRA), a domain-specific dialogue system, which realizes an ontology-based Natural Language Processing system for shopping situations.