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A travel consultation system: Towards a smooth conversation in Japanese

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Book cover Logic Programming '85 (LP 1985)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 221))

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Abstract

We have developed a travel consultation system which extracts user's requests through natural language (Japanese) conversation and answers destinations that fit the case.

The system has four parts, the parsing subsystem, the user model subsystem, the sentence generator, and the database retriever. All subsystems are written in PROLOG.

The distinctive characters of conversations which our system makes are:

  • smoothness and kindness,

  • that the system can be a topic introducer, and

  • efficiency.

How the system works is as follows:

First, the system parses Japanese sentences that the user inputs. The input sentences are interpreted as user's requests, not as the answer for the previous question. So he can add any requests other than the questioned one. Next, the system guesses the user's type, evaluating user models that the system has. Each user model represents the expected type of users. Then it generates a next question which that type of users would care. This parse-guess-generate sequence are continued till the topics which the user cares are exhausted. At last the system searches the database and shows places that satisfy all requests of the user.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tokyo Systems Research Department, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., 17-15, Shinbashi 6-chome, Minato-ku, 105, Tokyo, Japan

    H. Suzuki, M. Kiyono, S. Kougo, M. Takahashi, S. Motoike & T. Niki

Authors
  1. H. Suzuki
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  2. M. Kiyono
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  3. S. Kougo
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  4. M. Takahashi
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  5. S. Motoike
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  6. T. Niki
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Editor information

Eiiti Wada

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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Suzuki, H., Kiyono, M., Kougo, S., Takahashi, M., Motoike, S., Niki, T. (1986). A travel consultation system: Towards a smooth conversation in Japanese. In: Wada, E. (eds) Logic Programming '85. LP 1985. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 221. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16479-0_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16479-0_22

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-16479-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39820-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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