AskMe A WebBased FAQ Management Tool

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AskMeA Web-Based FAQ Management Tool

• Alex Albu

2
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

3
Alternative Solution

• Allow customers to ask their questions online or
  browse the companys knowledge base
• Result
• Instant, real-time customer service
• Reduced workload for the company's customer
  service representatives

4
AskMe

• Create and manage FAQ knowledge bases
• Instantly publish FAQs on the web
• Hosted application with a customizable skin,
  matching the clients website

5
Architecture Overview
Search Engine (C)
Java Application
Database Engine
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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
Search Engine
RMI
JNI
Web Server
Servlet Engine
Search Engine
RMI
JNI
Business Objects
Search MUX
DB
Servlets
DB MUX
DB
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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
Business Objects in web server
dispatches request
Servlet (Controller)
returns data
sends request
builds
Page Model (Model)
JSP Page (View)
is consumed by
displays 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 indexing
Document
Parser
Stopword filter
Porter stemmer
Synonym library
Collection
Statistical Analyzer (TF-IDF)
Index builder
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Search Engine Architecture
Document matching
Query
Parser
Stopword filter
Porter stemmer
Collection
Synonym library
Ranked documents
Statistical Analyzer (TF-IDF)
Vector space model
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Database Design
KB
1
ROOT_ID
COMPANY_ID
KB_CATEG
KB_TREE
KB_ITEM
1
1

ID
KB_CATEG_ID
ID

PARENT_ID
ANCESTOR_ID
KB_CATEG_ID
1
DEPTH
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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 its
  valid HTML

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File Import Architecture
Excel
Excel2SAX
XML
XSLT processor
XML
DB
Import module
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