AskMeA Web-Based FAQ Management Tool

Alex Albu

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

• 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

• Create and manage FAQ knowledge bases

• Instantly publish FAQs on the web

• Hosted application with a customizable “skin”, matching the client’s website

AskMe

Architecture Overview

JavaApplication

DatabaseEngine

Search Engine(C++)

(Quasi) Distributed Architecture

• Multiple search servers

• Multiple database servers

• Multiple web servers (load balancer)

• Caching

• Pooling

Architecture Details

Servlet Engine

BusinessObjects

SearchMUX

DBMUX

DB

DB

Ser

vlet

s

Web Server

SearchEngineJN

IR

MI

SearchEngineJN

IR

MI

Presentation Layer

• MVC pattern

• Clear separation of data from presentation

• Customized JSP pages for each company

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

Search Engine

• Written in C++

• Accessed via JNI

• Implements a modified vector-space search algorithm

• Builds document collections in file system

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)

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:

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

Search Engine Architecture

Document Parser Stopword filter Porter stemmer

Synonym library

Index builderCollection

Document indexing

Statistical Analyzer(TF-IDF)

Search Engine Architecture

Document matching

Query Parser Stopword filter Porter stemmer

Synonym library

Vector space model

Collection

Statistical Analyzer(TF-IDF)

Rankeddocuments

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

KB Creation

• Easy knowledge base creation

• 2 options• Using the KB editor• Doing bulk imports

KB Editor

• HTML-based graphic editor

• FAQ and category creation and editing

• KB tree editing

KB Import

• Clients have to provide• FAQs• Knowledge base structure

• XML is the perfect format

• Clients can upload their files directly

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

File Import Architecture

Excel

XML

XML

Excel2SAX

XSLTprocessor

Import moduleDB HTML Tidy

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

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