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Question Answering in the Business Environment
Yael Ravin
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:1999 2003
Software $1.4B $5.4BKM Access software
$0.5B $3.3B
Infrastructure $0.9B $2.0BManagementServices
$1.3B $10.2B
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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
Provide a secure single point of access to diverse information, business processes, and expertise personalized to a user's needs and responsibilities anywhere and at anytime
ApplicationsInformation Collaboration
Corporate PervasiveCommerce
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A Simplified ‘one stop shopping’ Access to tools and information
One view of multiple data sources
A place to "Push" the latest information targeted to the practitioner
The latest documents crawled,
categorized and indexed every night
Claim DataProposalsRatings
Engineering Documents
U/W TemplatesLossesOSHASAFERNews
... A place to encourage collaboration and deeper team involvement
Communities:Mobile worker, Home Office, professional interest groups
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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
58.3%Extremely Difficult
Difficult
Barely Acceptable
Easy
Extremely Easy
0 10 20 30 40 50
(N=350)Percent respondents
Finding Information by Search on the Network
Extremely
14%
Very
52%
Somewhat28%
Not very
6%
How Important is Search to your site?(eCommerce sites)
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 QuestionsWhat 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
• 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
• 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.
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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