Search in the mood: the information filter based on ambiguous queries

Following the rapid promotion of e-commerce, an unprecedented number of products are now merchandised via online stores. Behind the prosperity of e-commerce, however, consumers are now grabbling for what they purchase, drowning in a slew of offerings. In order to assist customers on decision-making, this paper introduces the information filter with the concept of ‘kansei engineering’. This filter allows users to search the products based on abstract queries and provides the variety of recommendations. ‘Kansei’ is a Japanese vocabulary that represents the psychological feeling or image of a product and kansei engineering is an activity to develop a new product translating a consumer’s needs and feelings. The concept of kansei engineering meets the requirement to bring out the customer’s abstract demand that is hard to cover with lexical match. The authors evaluated the filter with actual product data retrieved from Yahoo! shopping site and demonstrate its flexibility and potential of the filter.