<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="H01-1013">
  <Title>Conversational Sales Assistant for Online Shopping</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In our system, a presentation manager captures queries from users, employs a parser to transform the user's query into a logical form, and sends the logical form to a dialog manager.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The presentation manager is also responsible for obtaining the system's response from the dialog manager and presenting it to the user using template-based generation. The dialog manager formulates action plans for an action manager to perform back-end tasks such as database access, business transactions, etc. The dialog manager applies information state-based dialog strategies to formulate responses depending on the current state, discourse history and the action results from the action manager.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The Data Management Subsystem maintains a &amp;quot;concept&amp;quot; repository with common sense &amp;quot;concepts&amp;quot; and a phrasal lexicon that lists possible ways for referring to the concepts. Business Rules map concepts to business specifications by defining concepts using a propositional logic formula of constraints over product specifications. Thus, the Business Rules reflect business goals and decisions. The Extended Database combines product specifications and precompiled evaluations of the concept definitions for each product to provide a representation that guides the natural language dialog. We are investigating automated tools for helping developers and maintainers extract relevant concepts and terms on the basis of user descriptions and queries about products.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>