Using Textual Summaries to Describe a Set of Products

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for generating natural language summaries of product sets, highlighting price ranges and common features, aiming to assist customers in unfamiliar domains.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach to summarizing product sets in natural language, focusing on price and feature insights, with an evaluation of user perceptions and influence.

Findings

Participants found the summaries useful.

Summaries did not significantly influence purchase decisions.

The method effectively highlights key product set characteristics.

Abstract

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.