Chatting to Personalize and Plan Cultural Itineraries

In this paper, we present a system for the generation of cultural itineraries that exploits conversational agents to implicitly build formal user profiles. The key idea is that the preferences for user profiling are not obtained in a direct way, but acquired during a natural language conversation of the tourists with the system. When the user profile is ready, it becomes the input for the generation of the customized cultural itinerary. The proposed system, called DiEM System, is designed for dialogues in the domain of cultural heritage, but its flexible architecture allows to customize the dialogues in different application domains (cinema, finance, medicine, etc.).