A Question Answering System for the Operation of Software Applications

Reflecting the rapid growth of information technology, the configuration of software applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, is both sophisticated and complicated. It is often difficult for users to identify the relevant functions in an online manual of a target application. In this paper, we propose a question answering system that finds functions related to a user's request. To enhance our system, we addressed two "mismatch" problems. The first problem is associated with mismatch in vocabulary, in which the same concept is represented by different words in the manual and in the user's question. The second problem is associated with mismatch in function. Although a user may have a hypothetical function for their purpose in mind, the purpose can sometimes be accomplished by other functions. To resolve these mismatch problems, we use the World Wide Web to extract related terms for software functions, so that a user's question can be matched to the relevant function with a high accuracy. We show the effectiveness of our system experimentally.