In online, dynamic environments, the services requested by consumers may not be readily served by the providers. This requires the service consumers and providers to negotiate their service needs and offers. Multiagent negotiation approaches typically assume that the parties agree on service content and focus on finding a consensus on service price. In contrast, this work develops an approach through which the parties can negotiate the content of a service. This calls for a negotiation approach in which the parties can understand the semantics of their requests and offers and learn each other's preferences incrementally over time. Accordingly, we propose an architecture in which both consumers and producers use a shared ontology to negotiate a service. Through repetitive interactions, the provider learns consumers' needs accurately and can make better targeted offers. To enable fast and accurate learning of preferences, we develop an extension to Version Space and compare it with existing learning techniques. We further develop a metric for measuring semantic similarity between services and compare the performance of our approach using different similarity metrics.
['Reyhan Aydoğan', 'Pinar Yolum']
Learning consumer preferences using semantic similarity