Analysis and Synthesis of Help-Desk Responses

Abstract

Abstract. We present a corpus-based approach for the automatic analysis and synthesis of email responses to help-desk requests. This approach can be used to automatically deal with repetitive requests of low technical content, thus enabling help-desk operators to focus their effort on more difficult requests. We propose a method for extracting high-precision sentences for inclusion in a response, and a measure for predicting the completeness of a planned response. The idea is that complete, high-precision responses may be sent directly to users, while incomplete responses should be passed to operators. Our results show that a small but significant proportion (14%) of our automatically generated responses have a high degree of precision and completeness, and that our measure can reliably predict the completeness of a response.

When the chips are down: Social and technical aspects of computer failure and repair

“…The bulk of help-desk and support research has focused on how help-desk functions can be aided (e.g. Abraham et al, 1991;Gonzalez et al, 2005;Kriegsman and Barletta, 1993;Marom and Zukerman, 2005;Sauter, 2004) by information support technologies, such as case-based and AI systems, although some (e.g. Rimmer and Wakeman, 1999) have cautioned that such systems may complicate rather than improve support functions.…”