Increasing profitability: Voice-based browsing to recommendation system Web services

We present a mediator Web service to provide voice-based access to recommendation systems through voice portals. The mediator allows requests for recommendation to be forwarded from the voice portal to the recommendation system Web service and uses natural language generation to summarizes the recommendation results and potential follow-ups as a VoiceXML dialog that is sent back to the portal. Since the mediator must be independent of the recommendation application, the semantics of the concepts used in the two services is reconciled by ontology-mediation: the mediator publishes its general recommendation system's ontology of entities and queries and the recommendation system Web service, in turn, attaches specific entities and services it provides, as specialization of concepts of the published general ontology that the mediator is able to convey as a natural language dialog.