A Dynamic Approach to Reducing Dialog
in On-Line Decision Guides

Michelle Doyle and Pdraig Cunningham

Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2, Ireland.
{Michelle.Doyle,Padraig.Cunningham}@cs.tcd.ie



Abstract. Online decision guides typically ask too many questions of
the user, as they make no attempt to focus the questions. We describe
some approaches to minimising the questions asked of a user in an
online query situation. Questions are asked in an order that reflects
their ability to narrow down the set of cases. Thus time to reach an
answer is decreased. This has the dual benefit of taking some of the
monotony out of online queries, and also of decreasing the amount of
network request-response cycles. Most importantly, question order is
decided at run time, and therefore adapts to the user. This approach is in
the spirit of lazy leaming with induction delayed to run-time, allowing
adaptation to the emerging details of the situation. We evaluate a few
different approaches to the question selection task, and compare the
best approach (one based on ideas from retrieval in CBR) to a
commercial online decision guide.
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