Interactive Critiquing forCatalog Navigation in E-Commerce

E-commerce sites can have large, essentiallyunbounded, catalogs. With large catalogs comesincreasing difficulty for buyers in making useof standard search and browsing facilities.Particularly in the case of casual oroccasional buyers and in the case of complexproducts, the gap between a product'sspecifications and the buyer's understanding ofneed can be hard to bridge. An effectivee-commerce catalog must map user needs toproducts that can fulfill them. This paperdescribes an interactive, incremental,case-based, critiquing approach to solving thisproblem. The approach is interactive andincremental, so it does not require that theuser have a completely specified need at thestart. The system is case-based in that itemphasizes products over features orconstraints, and uses case-based reasoningtechniques for its product retrieval. Finally,the approach is based on the critiquing ofpresented examples, each critique redirectingthe search to home in on appropriate products.