Detecting Bot-Answerable Questions in Ubuntu Chat

Abstract

Ubuntu's Internet Relay Chat technical support channel has bots that output specific messages in response to command words from other channel users. These messages can be used to answer frequently-asked questions instead of requiring an expert to (repeatedly) type a lengthy reply. We describe an approach to automatically distinguish bot-answerable questions, which would mitigate this problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on investigating question answering in a multiparticipant chat domain. Our results indicate that for some types of questions, supervised learning algorithms perform well on this task and, in addition, that character n-grams are a better representation than traditional bag-of-words for this task and domain.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2013
Accession Number
ADA602746

Entities

People

  • David C. Uthus
  • David W. Aha

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Data Science
  • Foreign Languages
  • Information Retrieval
  • Information Science
  • Internet
  • Language
  • Learning
  • Machine Learning
  • Military Research
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Operating Systems
  • Personality
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Supervised Machine Learning

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Linguistics

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks