User Profiling in an Application of Electronic Commerce

Abstract

The COGITO ¹ project aims at improving consumer-supplier relationships in future e-commerce interfaces featuring agents which can converse with users in written natural language (chatterbots) and extending their capabilities. In this paper we present the personalization component, developed in the COGITO system, that allows for the classification of users accessing an e-commerce web site through Machine Learning techniques. In the final implementation, the resulting user profiles will be further analyzed to automatically extract usage patterns from the data given about user communities. This helps content providers to tailor their offers to the customers. needs, and can be used to generate assumptions about new users, when they start to converse with the system.

COGITO is an EU-funded project in the 5th Framework Programme, (IST-1999-13347)