SMS based Interface for FAQ Retrieval

Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th IJCNLP of the AFNLP, pages 852–860, Suntec, Singapore, 2-7 August 2009. c⃝2009 ACL and AFNLP SMS based Interface for FAQ Retrieval Govind Kothari IBM India Research Lab gokothar@in.ibm.com Sumit Negi IBM India Research Lab sumitneg@in.ibm.com Tanveer A. Faruquie IBM India Research Lab ftanveer@in.ibm.com Venkatesan T. Chakaravarthy IBM India Research Lab vechakra@in.ibm.com L. Venkata Subramaniam IBM India Research Lab lvsubram@in.ibm.com Abstract Short Messaging Service (SMS) is popu- larly used to provide information access to people on the move. This has resulted in the growth of SMS based Question An- swering (QA) services. However auto- matically handling SMS questions poses significant challenges due to the inherent noise in SMS questions. In this work we present an automatic FAQ-based question answering system for SMS users. We han- dle the noise in a SMS query by formu- lating the query similarity over FAQ ques- tions as a combinatorial search problem. The search space consists of combinations of all possible dictionary variations of to- kens in the noisy query. We present an ef- ficient search algorithm that does not re- quire any training data or SMS normaliza- tion and can handle semantic variations in question formulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two real- life datasets. 1 Introduction The number of mobile users is growing at an amazing rate. In India alone a few million sub- scribers are added each month with the total sub- scriber base now crossing 370 million. The any- time anywhere access provided by mobile net- works and portability of handsets coupled with the strong human urge to quickly find answers has fu- eled the growth of information based services on mobile devices. These services can be simple ad- vertisements, polls, alerts or complex applications such as browsing, search and e-commerce. The latest mobile devices come equipped with high resolution screen space, inbuilt web browsers and full message keypads, however a majority of the users still use cheaper models that have limited screen space and basic keypad. On such devices, SMS is the only mode of text communication. This has encouraged service providers to build in- formation based services around SMS technology. Today, a majority of SMS based information ser- vices require users to type specific codes to re- trieve information. For example to get a duplicate bill for a specific month, say June, the user has to type DUPBILLJUN. This unnecessarily con- straints users who generally find it easy and intu- itive to type in a “texting” language. Some businesses have recently allowed users to formulate queries in natural language using SMS. For example, many contact centers now allow cus- tomers to “text” their complaints and requests for information over SMS. This mode of communica- tion not only makes economic sense but also saves the customer from the hassle of waiting in a call queue. Most of these contact center based services and other regular services like “AQA 63336”1 by Issuebits Ltd, GTIP2 by AlienPant Ltd., …

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