Using Textual Summaries to Describe a Set of Products
This addresses a practical issue for e-commerce customers by providing product set overviews, though it is incremental as it builds on existing summarization techniques without showing impact on decisions.
The paper tackled the problem of helping customers understand unfamiliar product sets by generating natural language summaries focusing on price range, common features, and price-impacting features, but found that while participants found the summaries useful, they did not influence purchase selections.
When customers are faced with the task of making a purchase in an unfamiliar product domain, it might be useful to provide them with an overview of the product set to help them understand what they can expect. In this paper we present and evaluate a method to summarise sets of products in natural language, focusing on the price range, common product features across the set, and product features that impact on price. In our study, participants reported that they found our summaries useful, but we found no evidence that the summaries influenced the selections made by participants.