Development of an intelligent assistant for selection of goods in the process of dialogue with the user

Abstract

This article is devoted to the development of methods for creating intelligent assistants. Intelligent assistants can be used in call centers to solve customer problems, to solve technical support tasks, to help people with disabilities, to help in choosing goods, etc. We consider intelligent assistants that engage in argumentative dialogue with users, aimed at finding goods and services that maximally satisfy users’ wants and needs. The development of the intelligent assistant is based on a four-level model of the subject domain and a semantic model of the user. The system under development automates the process of search and decision justification through the reuse of domain cases: accumulated knowledge about previous dialogues with users. This gives the system we developed an advantage over existing analogues, which are incapable of reusing knowledge about previous dialogues. The paper develops a case-based approach to building an intelligent system capable of reasoning about its responses. For this purpose, an argumentation graph is constructed, methods for structuring domain cases are developed, and ontological homomorphisms are used to transform the available domain cases into a finished solution. A description of model-theoretical methods for constructing intelligent assistants is presented. The cases of goods, users and dialogues of an intelligent assistant with users are formally described in the form of partial models. The transformation of domain cases and similarity of cases are formalized using ontological homomorphisms of partial models. The purpose of the developed dialogue system is not only to select a solution according to the user’s request, but also to find out the tasks that the user is going to solve, to analyze his argumentation, and then to justify the proposed solution to the user, to show that this particular product or service will be able to meet his needs.