Question Answering in the Business Environment

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Question Answering in the Business Environment

• Yael Ravin
• ravin_at_us.ibm.com
• T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM

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Knowledge Management

• "Know what you know/don't know"
• Involving both people and IT
• knowledge sharing culture (communities)
• tools to enable access, processing, authoring and
  dissemination
• Inside and outside the enterprise
• B2E - increase productivity training support
  innovation
• B2C - online shopping online support
• Within and across industries
• B2B - dynamic marketplaces.

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KM is a big market

• IDC Knowledge Management Magazine survey
  (01/01)
• about 30 of IT budgets was allocated for KM in
  2001
• IDC WW KM Market forecast

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KM Challenges

• Improve support for information seeking
• search, question answering, dialog systems
• classification and visualization
• Identify useful information
• recommendation systems, link analysis, personal
  profiles
• Reduce information overload
• filtering, summarization
• Develop new ways to capture knowledge
• phone, meetings, presentations

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Portals a KM path to market
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A Simplified one stop shopping Access to tools
and information
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Lotus Knowledge Discovery System
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NLP/IR Technologies in Portals today

• Search engine
• Document classification
• Document clustering
• Summarization
• Information Extraction
• Quality metrics
• Subscription and notification based on profile

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Integrate QA in KM and portals

• Work within different business domains and needs
• shopping, expertise locator, business
  intelligence, ...
• Integrate with other functionalities
• a generic search engine
• a dialog system
• Operate with multiple sources of information
• databases, text, presentations

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Online Shopping
Source Forrester Report "Must Search Stink?"
June 2000
Source Meta Group Multiclient Enterprise Portal
Study (1999)
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Business Value Search-Related Revenue

• Precision/Recall vs. "Find Rate
• Cycle
• Enter Search - learn - shop - buy - receive
  - use

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Some ThinkPad Questions

• What hard disks can I add to my ThinkPad 570?
• How do I add memory to my ThinkPad?
• Can I buy an external monitor for my laptop?
• What docking station works with my ThinkPad 570?
• What's a port replicator?
• Can I buy a port replicator for my ThinkPad 570?
• What batteries are available for my ThinkPad?
• What power adapters are compatible with my
  ThinkPad 570?
• What keyboards are available for my ThinkPad?
• How do I add Ethernet capability to my ThinkPad?

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Expertise Location

• Current system is "Person to Topic Affinity" -
  based on documents in the topic and the people
  who authored, contributed, distributed, read and
  subscribed
• Opportunity for Question Answering

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Question Answering for Resumes

• Question Topics
• Education (degrees, certificates)
• programming languages, OS, applications, h/w, etc
  
• Knowledge/expertise in a technical domain
• Knowledge of industry
• experience w/ customers, or business analysis
• Title/Role/Occupation
• e.g., analyst, engineer, sales rep
• Previous customer engagements
• Previous experience (including before IBM)
• Geographic location and languages known

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Sample Questions

• Who has professional experience with the
  Internet?
• Who has experience with Internet security?
• Who has participated in customer engagements
  involving Internet security?
• Who has led healthcare related engagements?
• Who is a systems architect in the sales and
  distribution industry?
• Who was project manager of an inventory
  management project?
• Who has a degree in AI and experience with expert
  systems?

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Approach

• Search over metadata and structured data
• Handle joints
• "systems analyst in publishing"
• Massage text
• multi-word NPs Internet security, inventory
  management
• missing subjects "Developed Web apps..."
• resume structure
• Domain ontology and knowledge of geography
• "AI expert", "KM specialists in Europe"
• Extend semantic annotation for the domain
• educational degrees, industries, ...

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Conversational Interface for Shopping
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Interaction
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Conflict Resolution
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Conversational Interface for Online Shopping

• Natural language dialog for finding IBM products
  on the Web
• Bridge the gap b/w consumer, business and content
  owner
• Based on NPs and keywords used by consumers to
  describe products
• Study compared w/ menu-driven app
• shortens interaction time by 33,
• reduces number of clicks by 63

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Virtual Assistant

• Messaging
• Do I have any messages from John?
• Fax that to 914-555-1234.
• Send Jennifer a note.
• Reply to that.
• List the first 4 messages.
• Delete the message from Rich.
• Calendaring
• What's on my calendar next Tuesday?
• Am I free tomorrow afternoon from 2 to 3?
• Please set up a one hour meeting this Friday and
  invite Jane.
• Delete today's meeting at 3 o'clock.
• Call management
• Record a new voice greeting.
• Hold all my calls until 1 pm.
• Forward my calls to extension 5123.
• Call Jim on his cell phone.
• Conference Stella in on this call.

• Address book
• What is David's office number.
• Create and new contact for Jim Hanks.
• Miscellaneous
• This is John Doe and my passcode is 123456
• What time is it?
• Hold on just a minute
• Repeat that

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Virtual Assistant

• Intelligent speech understanding providing access
  to and control of business applications through
  broad class of devices.
• Unified messaging framework for e-mail, voice
  mail, and fax
• Create NL grammar by domain e-mail, calendars,
  call management, general information

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Issues for QA in business

• Integrate QA with other KM technologies
• Prototype QA for applications and learn what is
  useful
• Develop measures
• improvement attributable to QA
• good enough for customers to use
• cost of customization to new domains and
  applications