A Comparative Study of Information-Gathering Approaches for Answering Help-Desk Email Inquiries

Abstract. We present a comparative study of corpus-based methods for the automatic synthesis of email responses to help-desk requests. Our methods were developed by considering two operational dimensions: (1) information-gathering technique, and (2) granularity of the information. In particular, we investigate two techniques – retrieval and prediction – applied to information represented at two levels of granularity – sentence level and document level. We also developed a hybrid method that combines prediction with retrieval. Our results show that the different approaches are applicable in different situations, addressing a combined 72 % of the requests with either complete or partial responses.