Flyer Information Management and Governance
Artificial Intelligence for Virtual Assistant IDOL for Virtual Assistant, is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered solution, that allows organizations to offer their customers and employees access to information and processes using an automated human-like operator which can engage in natural language dialogues.
streamline the retrieval process, which allows such databases of information to allow natural To address an increasingly diverse information to be obtained in a more conve- language questions to receive direct factual nient and user-friendly fashion. Moreover, it answers. This is achieved by processing and range of information requests, should offer an interface to allow configura- understanding the question and mapping it to IDOL uses our unique Natural tion of that process to ensure existing human an appropriate structured query that will in turn Language Question Answering knowledge is allowed to create and train the respond with the desired answer. An example (NLQA) technology to allow natural system to answer questions optimally. In gen- of this would be databases of financial prices conversations between end users eral, there are three independent steps to ac- over time, allowing a query such as, “What was complish this. the EPS of HPQ in Q3 2016?” to receive the and a virtual assistant, to perform precise answer. This database of structure in- queries against: curated (FAQ) Answer Bank formation is generally known as the fact bank. responses (Answer Bank), data Many administrators of support or user-help tables and data services (Fact systems have an existing set of frequently In addition, the system should have the abil- Bank), and unstructured documents asked questions that human support agents ity to understand and extract information (for (Passage Extraction); and to are trained on, or the help pages are populated example names, numbers) from unstructured data such as free-form documents. It means follow configured processes to with. For example, if a user encounters a par- ticular problem on his mobile phone, then the that databases can be automatically populated facilitate knowledge discovery. manufacturer has established steps that the with a rich set of structured data from a corpus user should follow to try to correct the prob- of unstructured documents. For example, in- lem. The system should be loaded with these gesting a set of corporate annual reports could Question Answering answers to provide the best one when a given create tables of financial data so that a ques- The information retrieval process is at first question is asked or a particular problem is tion such as, “What was BP’s revenue in North glance well established—a user enters some encountered. In addition, the system’s natural America in the second half of 2015?” will return search terms, a Boolean expression, a docu- language processing (NLP) should ensure that the correct value pulled from such a table. ment, or a natural language query, and a set differently worded variants of the same ques- of relevant documents are returned—but in tions are all directed to the relevant answer. Passage Extraction many situations this workflow can be optimized This knowledge base is generally referred to In many cases, the information requested is further. If a user enters a direct question, for as the answer bank. simply not present in either an FAQ data set example, then it is generally more appropriate or a structured database, and an extended ap- to respond with a direct answer rather than a Fact Bank proach is required. It is at this point that the sys- document or documents that may contain the Users frequently have tables of information that tem must be able to process human information answer. The technology must be able to under- are commonly matched via structured (SQL) effectively. Once again, the question should be stand, process, and answer direct questions to queries. The system should be able to exploit processed to achieve a basic understanding Flyer Artificial Intelligence for Virtual Assistant
of what is being requested and then, the sys- How do I turn o roaming on iPhone® 7 FAQ tem must form a query against its corpus to Answer bank support documents find the most relevant documents. The system Step by step instructions must process the selected portions of those documents to determine the short passage that it believes most accurately answers the What is HPQ’s Q3 FY16 EPS? Structured data original question. Statistical and probabilistic Fact bank from structured and $0.48 unstructured sources thresholding is used to determine whether an answer is relevant enough to answer the ques- tion, so that if a valid answer simply isn’t pres- What did critic X say about ent in the corpus then none is returned. Once movie Y? Passage Document extraction repositories again, the system must have the language-han- Quote from a TV interview dling capability to allow this process to work in any language. Figure 1. Question answering in natural language
The above steps combine to form a powerful who will guide them to the correct solution or description. In many cases, the problem can data analytics system for processing ques- answer. However, large teams of human oper- be answered directly and a single answer or tions of any type. The typical workflow is to ators are costly and clients are often frustrated solution provided, but in many other cases, a first check whether the query is appropriate for by having to wait to talk to someone. So, how conversation between the system and the user question processing as many queries are not can we accelerate the right information to the is required to gather more information on how of this type. If it is, then it matches the ques- to diagnose and solve the problem. tion against the answer bank to see if a pre- right user in the right context? defined answer has been set. If none is found, it will then try the fact bank to see whether a A Natural Language Question Answering sys- This can be achieved by training the system precise answer is present. And again, if no an- tem can be extended to create a more natural with classes of problems and the type of infor- swer is found, then it will pass the query to the system of customer services. Rather than a mation that is needed in each case. The sys- system’s unstructured index to see if an ap- single search box, an IM-style interface allows tem will then respond with follow-up questions propriate passage can be found that answers a user to enter an initial question or problem until it believes it has enough knowledge to the question.
Dialogue Systems I need the cheapest ticket from London to Boston For many users contacting a company for help • with a problem or an inquiry, a search box is in- • “Quantity?”, “Date and time?”, “Preferred airline?” sufficient. Even if the system is capable of -un • Ticket quantity, schedule, airline preference derstanding and processing direct questions, • Best options optimized for dierent parameters the user is often unable to accurately describe – Schedule, cost, mileage program the problem or need or fails to provide enough information. The natural response in such sit- uations is to want to talk to a human operator Figure 2. Dialogue system
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suggest a solution. Here is a very simple exam- administrator to easily refine the answers’ avail- ple: user enters, “Cheapest ticket from London ability, accuracy and relevancy with a quick clicks. to Boston.” System asks, “Quantity, date and time, preferred airline?” User responds with Connecting Relevant Information answers. System presents best options opti- to Humans mized for different parameters: schedule, cost, Technology is only as good as the value real- mileage program. ized by its users. With the alluring promise of Big Data, comes some of the biggest barriers Simple Curation of Question/ to success—user adoption and productivity. Answer Pairs in Answer Bank True impact will come when humans can truly While it is natural to expect a manually inten- connect to technology. sive process for curating question/answer pairs (FAQs), IDOL comes with an intuitive GUI To learn more, please visit www.microfocus. tool to simplify such a process. This tool allows com/idol
Figure 3. Question/Answer pairs in answer bank
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