Collection and Exploitation of Expert Knowledge in Web Assistant Systems

Recent research and commercial developments have highlighted the importance of human involvement in user support for web information systems. In our earlier work a web assistant system has been introduced, which is a hybrid support system with human web assistants and computer-based support. An important issue with web assistant systems is how to make optimal use of these support resources. We use a knowledge management approach with frequently asked questions for a questionanswering system that acts as a question filter for the human assistants. Knowledge is continuously collected from the assistants and exploited to augment the questionanswering capabilities. Our system has been deployed and evaluated by an analysis of conversation logs and questionnaires for users and assistants. The results show that our approach is feasible and useful. Lessons learned are summarised in a set of recommendations.