A knowledge-based question answering system for B2C eCommerce

The evolution of Business-to-Consumer (B2C) eCommerce has been formed through various generations. Last models of B2C eCommerce are comparative shopping systems that connect to multiple vendors’ databases and collect the information requested by the user. The comparative result obtained is then displayed in a tabular format in the user’s browser. Although this scenario is much better than the multiple manual site comparisons, user still needs to face inconsistent user interfaces when he is linked from the comparison site to the actual purchasing site for shopping. Therefore, user has to learn logics of each site’s user interface. In this paper, we propose a question answering system based on natural language processing techniques for retail (B2C) in eCommerce. This system gets a question in natural language formats, decomposes it to keywords, and extracts constraints automatically. Corresponding answers are then retrieved from the vendors’ Web sites by exploiting the question constraints.