AskMe A 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

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 Java Application Database Engine Search Engine (C++)

(Quasi) Distributed Architecture Multiple search servers Multiple database servers Multiple web servers (load balancer) Caching Pooling

Architecture Details Servlet Engine Business Objects Search MUX DB MUX DB Servlets Web Server Search Engine JNI RMI Search Engine JNI RMI

Presentation Layer MVC pattern Clear separation of data from presentation Customized JSP pages for each company

Presentation Layer Servlet (Controller) Business Objects in web server Page Model (Model) JSP Page (View) sends request dispatches request returns data builds is consumed by displays 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 D i = (w i1, w i2, …, w it ) Each dimension represents a term in the vocabulary Goal: compute a similarity coefficient between two documents sim(D i, D j )

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 ParserStopword filterPorter stemmer Synonym library Index builder Collection Document indexing Statistical Analyzer (TF-IDF)

Search Engine Architecture Document matching Query ParserStopword filterPorter stemmer Synonym library Vector space model Collection Statistical Analyzer (TF-IDF) Ranked documents

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 Excel2SAX XSLT processor Import module DB 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