Abstract
Recommending a good trip plan for a particular traveler is often not a trivial task for a travel agent. A travel agent has to satisfy not only the customer’s personal preferences and constraints, but also the complex spatial, temporal, physical constraints and cost imposed by the transportation methods among visiting spots and various environmental supports such as the availability of hotels. In traditional recommendation mechanisms, users are required to express their preferences for many aspects of a trip. Then the system can recommend a trip plan by a collaborative method or a content-based method. However, a traveler may not often express clearly his or her preferences over a trip plan at the outset unless they get more information about the visiting destinations or some details about the trip. Therefore, a travel agent alone cannot always decide a satisfactory trip plan for a traveler without the involvement of the traveler. Communication and negotiation with the traveler becomes a necessary discipline to recommend a trip plan for the traveler.In this thesis, we are in particular interested in understanding how a travel agent could conduct such kinds of recommendation and negotiation dialogues with the user and come out with a satisfactory trip plan for the user. We focus on the techniques of recommendation by negotiation with the user and by satisfying user’s personal preferences and domain constraints of various kinds. The recommendation and negotiation dialogue of a travel agent is primarily driven by the mechanisms of resolution of constraint violation.