A Smarter FAQ

A common part of any website is the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section, where visitors wade through a list of questions and answers regarding a certain area of knowledge. FAQs were a great improvement over the previous practice of having a dedicated employee answer every question. However, website visitors are not particularly efficient at browsing a FAQ, the equivalent of searching a file for a string of characters — especially if this file is significantly large. To shift this burden away from the visitor and onto the computer, we leverage modern search technology, coupled with a dynamic learning system and basic techniques of Natural Language Processing (NLP), thus allowing the visitor to concentrate on using the information rather than searching for it. We present a web service nicknamed “The Professor” that can retrieve answers or carry out commands for an arbitrary knowledge base.