Students and staff in the School of Computing would benefit from having a system of Case Based FAQ System Project (FAQs) that was interactive and for which it was easy to add FAQs. Similar questions are asked frequently at similar times of year and so can be reused many times each year and also in subsequent years.
FAQ systems normally contain textual FAQs and it would be good if the interaction with the FAQ system could be in natural language. By indexing the FAQs with keywords and doing matching between words in the query and the keywords and text in the FAQ, it is possible to retrieve FAQs that are similar to the query.
A simple use of synonyms or background knowledge of some concepts in these FAQs will enable a useful interaction with the FAQs. The underlying methodology of the FAQ system will be Case-Based Reasoning (CBR).
CBR systems solve new problems by retrieving similar cases from a database of previously solved problems (i.e. FAQs). The project will focus on the content and keyword labelling of FAQs so that FAQ cases are easy to acquire and are retrieved for relevant queries.