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Question Answering for the Operation of Software Applications: A Document Retrieval Approach

Atsushi FUJII, Seiji TAKEGATA

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Summary :

Reflecting the rapid growth of information technology, the configuration of software applications such as word processors and spreadsheets is both sophisticated and complicated. It is often difficult for users to identify relevant functions in the online manual for a target application. In this paper, we propose a method for question answering that finds functions related to the user's request. To enhance our method, we addressed two "mismatch" problems. The first problem is associated with a mismatch in vocabulary, where the same concept is represented by different words in the manual and in the user's question. The second problem is associated with a mismatch in function. Although the user may have a hypothetical function for a purpose in mind, this purpose can sometimes be accomplished by other functions. To resolve these mismatch problems, we extract terms related to software functions from the Web, so that the user's question can be matched to the relevant function with high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method experimentally.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information Vol.E93-D No.6 pp.1369-1377
Publication Date
2010/06/01
Publicized
Online ISSN
1745-1361
DOI
10.1587/transinf.E93.D.1369
Type of Manuscript
Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Info-Plosion)
Category
Natural Language Processing

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