Towards Queryable User Profiles: Introducing Conversational Agents in a Platform for Holistic User Modeling

In this article we introduce the concept of queryable user profile, that is to say, a representation of the user that can be queried through natural language requests. Such a representation allows the user to inspect the information that is encoded in her own profile and is supposed to: (i) make profiling and personalization processes more transparent and responsible; (ii) improve self-awareness and self-consciousness about personal data that are spread on the Web and personal devices. To this end, we designed MyrrorBot, a conversational agent that is built on top of a platform for holistic user modeling called Myrror. Basically, the system supports two groups of intents: (i) natural language requests to inspect the information encoded in the profile; (ii) personalized access to online services, such as music, video, news, and food recommendation. In both the scenarios, every question is caught by the conversational agent that interprets the information need of the user and generates an appropriate answer that fulfills the request. In the experimental evaluation, we investigated both users’ acceptance of the system as well as the time required to access to the information encoded in the profile, and the results showed that our system allows to significantly improve the way people can access to personal information, thus confirming the validity of the intuition and paving the way for further development of our system.