Slashdot Mirror
Domain: askjeeves.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to askjeeves.com.
Stories · 4
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IBM's Virtual Helpdesk For The Masses
An Anonymous Coward writes: "From the NYtimes: IBM has recently announced AI that supposedly can handle 20,000 simultaneous 'Help Desk Requests.' Per the release not only can it handle complaints in normal prose (typed, not spoken), but also fix them. Will wonders never cease -- a robot to tell me which key is the 'any' key?! ... Please let this be more than Ask Jeeves." -
Language Parsing and AI-Where are we now?
C-Town asks: "Browsing through the Slashdot articles to research Artificial Intelligence, the Artificial Intelligence IRC Bot contest came up and it brought me to think.. How far have we gotten in AI technology in terms of language/text parsing? How long will it be before Ask Jeeves will start working so well that it could replace all pattern matching and neural networking based searches? Instead of giving me categories when I submit a query, return to me abstracts (not hand entered but abstracts generated by the ai engine, that describes the article in context of the search query, when the match is made) of the documents on the web with their respective links? I know Autonomy currenlty have a product out to improve data mining and they route customer service emails with what they call "high performance pattern matching algorithms" (I think it's neural networking?) but they're still not able to analyze whole documents in a lexical manner. What companies/research institutes are currently working on this? Imagine being able to search through all /. comments with a question like "Who makes the best Linux Laptops" and get great results. I can imagine this to stop spam eventually too! " -
Ask Gneeves?
eries writes: "On my way home today, I had a brainstorm that I want to share with the /. community. It's an idea for an open-source Web project similar to the Open Directory Project. The idea would be to provide search functionality similar to that offered by "Ask Jeeves" - users input English-language questions and then get back a list of potential resources that they could use to find the answer. I am currently too busy with other projects (although one of them such as enzyme.sourceforge.net, the engine that backs Catalyst Recruiting has a lot of related code) to really spearhead and maintain this project. I have, however, purchased the domain names that will be necessary to make it work: askgneeves.com (this time the N is silent). Anyone out there interested in working on it? Anyone think it's even a good idea? Is someone already doing this? I think that pretty soon we could have an open-source product that would be useful to 90% of the clueless users out there.""The problems with Ask Jeeves are two-fold:
- They only have a few paid editors who try and compile the list of questions and answers
- They in general only provide a single link to a question that they already know the answer to. Big companies provide big money to make sure that their resource is listed first/exclusively and these big sites are not always the best sources of information. For instance the questions "Where can I buy an Ethernet cable" should take you to a site like Pricewatch and not to CompUSA in order to get the best deal.
The open source community can solve this problem easily. We allow anyone who wants to to submit question-and-answer pairs, and then we allow end-users to vote (or should we call it moderate?) on which answers are best suited to each question. Thus, the system grows as a result of its users activity, and is not really subject to editorial control. Even less editorial control that Slashdot, believe it or not."
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AskJeeves Interview
laborit writes "FNwire has posted an interview with Jeeves of ask.com. Evidently that "unique natural language engine with a proprietary knowledgebase isn't too great for questions like "bees? I don't understand." " Check out the archived pdf of this for more information.