An Improved Answer Retrieval System Taping the Linkage Structure for Noisy SMS Queries

Abstract

advent of technology has not only tailored the scientific and research work but has also sufficed to the needs of a commoner. Although communication and online support has become quite contemporary yet it requires huge amount of human resource to meet the varied demands. In this paper a server application is proposed which provides automated support for the customer queries via Short Messaging Service (SMS). It facilitates a layman with an instant answer to any of his query. The system is highly capable of handling inherent noise present in the queries and also taps their syntactic and semantic structure. This approach performs two functions simultaneously. One of which is handling of noise and inferring the best possible question, which the user actually meant to ask. Second is to match the refined question with the existing database of questions and then provide a corresponding answer. The system exploits both the above elevated technologies. It is a server application which automates the answer retrieval task via SMS. The retrieval process is such that the user is provided with the five topmost relevant answers to his/her query instantly. The communication starts via SMS from the user. This SMS is received by the system which is installed on central server. It then processes the incoming message. Answer retrieval process deals with two major tasks. In the preliminary step, processing of the message is done in order to eliminate inherent noise. This noise is due to the presence of abbreviations, transliterations, etc. Subsequently, a noise free query is incurred. The refined query is then parsed using the natural language parser providing us with the Question focus. The Question focus derived is used to rank the corpus questions, thereby resulting in the precise answer (1).