CHAYANI: a shopper’s assistant Sandip Sen, Partha Sarathi Dutta, and Sandip Debnath Mathematical & Computer Sciences Department University of Tulsa E-mail: sandip-sen@utulsa.edu Abstract Shopping on the Internet has become a convenient way of purchasing commodities of choice. A key contribution of agent technology will be to develop personal agents that can assist users by generating, filtering, collecting, or transforming information available on the Internet. We believe that knowledgeable agents can increase the pro- ductivity and satisfaction on online shoppers by suggesting query reformulations to obtain products and services of particular interest to the user. A consumer interested in a particular product class, e.g., a consumer electronic item, can use such an agent to locate a desired product fitting a specified budget from one of several online stores. Apart from finding good deals on a product, such a “buyer’s agent” can also suggest a higher quality alternatives for even a slightly higher price. We identify the types of query reformulation that will be particularly useful for online shoppers. We character- ize the information requirements of a domain ontology that enable flexible and effective query reformulations. We also demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by example interactions with a shopper’s assistant agent, CHAYANI, that we have developed for the consumer electronics domain. 1 Introduction The past few years has seen widespread growth of e-commerce and shopping on the Internet. Internet sites like Amazon.com provide the buyer with a variety of items at competitive prices. The security of online transactions and the reliability of information provided and the products purchased, however, are of concern to the buyer. Another issue of importance to an online consumer, especially a non-expert, is the abundance of information available at various e-commerce sites. An average user can easily be overwhelmed by the volume of information which is often incoherent, confusing, misleading, and can be more of a hindrance than assistance to the consumer. 1