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AskMeA Web-Based FAQ Management Tool

Alex Albu

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Background

Fast responses to customer inquiries – key factor in customer satisfaction

Costs for customer service are high $5 - $8 per phone call $.25 - $2.75 per email

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Allow customers to ask their questions online or browse the company’s knowledge base

Result: Instant, real-time customer service Reduced workload for the company's customer

service representatives

Alternative Solution

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Create and manage FAQ knowledge bases

Instantly publish FAQs on the web Hosted application with a customizable

“skin”, matching the client’s website

AskMe

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Architecture Overview

JavaApplication

DatabaseEngine

Search Engine(C++)

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(Quasi) Distributed Architecture

Multiple search servers Multiple database servers Multiple web servers (load balancer) Caching Pooling

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Architecture Details

Servlet Engine

BusinessObjects

SearchMUX

DBMUX

DB

DB

Ser

vlet

s

Web Server

SearchEngineJN

IR

MI

SearchEngineJN

IR

MI

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Presentation Layer

MVC pattern Clear separation of data from

presentation Customized JSP pages for each

company

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Presentation Layer

Servlet(Controller)

BusinessObjects

in web server

Page Model(Model)

JSP Page(View)

sends r

equest

dispatches request

returns data

builds

is consumed bydisplays page

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Search Engine

Written in C++ Accessed via JNI Implements a modified vector-space

search algorithm Builds document collections in file

system

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Vector-Space Search

Documents represented as vectors of weighted terms Di = (wi1, wi2, …, wit)

Each dimension represents a term in the vocabulary

Goal: compute a similarity coefficient between two documents sim(Di, Dj)

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Document Similarity

Weighting method: TF-IDF The weight of a term in a document is

the product of its term-frequency (TF) and the inverse of its document frequency (IDF)

Similarity function:

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Vector Construction

Eliminate meaningless words (stop words)

Bring words that occur in different morphological forms to a common root (stemming)

Use a thesaurus to replace synonyms Perform phrase recognition

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Search Engine Architecture

Document Parser Stopword filter Porter stemmer

Synonym library

Index builderCollection

Document indexing

Statistical Analyzer(TF-IDF)

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Search Engine Architecture

Document matching

Query Parser Stopword filter Porter stemmer

Synonym library

Vector space model

Collection

Statistical Analyzer(TF-IDF)

Rankeddocuments

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Database Design

KB_CATEG

ID

PARENT_ID

KB_TREE

KB_CATEG_ID

ANCESTOR_ID

KB_ITEM

ID

KB_CATEG_ID

KB

ROOT_ID

COMPANY_ID

DEPTH

1

1 1 *

*

1

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KB Creation

Easy knowledge base creation 2 options

Using the KB editor Doing bulk imports

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KB Editor

HTML-based graphic editor FAQ and category creation and editing KB tree editing

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KB Import

Clients have to provide FAQs Knowledge base structure

XML is the perfect format Clients can upload their files directly

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Import file transformation

Clients want various formats for the import file

XSLT used to convert input files to a standard XML format (DTD)

Import module maps XML DB schema FAQ content needs to be parsed to

ensure it’s valid HTML

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File Import Architecture

Excel

XML

XML

Excel2SAX

XSLTprocessor

Import moduleDB HTML Tidy

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Advantages over static FAQ lists

Easy FAQ creation and publishing by CSRs (no web developer intervention)

Reports, statistics on FAQ usage Helps understand the most frequent

types of questions Track usefulness of FAQs

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Conclusions

AskMe is a great way for websites to improve their customer service

Tool that reduces costs and contributes to customer retention

Easy to deploy, fast results