POET: The Online Preference Elicitation Tool

If the goal of eliciting accurate user preferences over a com­ plex value space is to be realized, the elicitation process must be through while at the same time not overly burdensome to the user. An ideal preference elicitation tool would max­ imize the information about preferences acquired from the user while minimizing the number of queries required. To this end, we present POET: the Online Preference Elicitation Tool. POET is a graphical Java applet designed to elicit complex preference structures to form a utility function. Once the elic­ itation process is complete POET outputs the resulting utility function as an XML document. Internally, POET represents utility for independent and dependent values as a set of depen­ dency trees. Though POET’s output and internal representa­ tion involves real numbers, from the user’s point-of-view, the experience is completely symbolic.