Semantic parsing of technical support questions

Abstract

Technical support problems are very complex. In contrast to regular web queries (that contain few keywords) or factoid questions (which are a few sentences), these problems usually include attributes like a detailed description of what is failing (symptom), steps taken in an effort to remediate the failure (activity), and sometimes a specific request or ask (intent). Automating support is the task of automatically providing answers to these problems given a corpus of solution documents. Traditional approaches to this task rely on information retrieval and are keyword based; looking for keyword overlap between the question and solution documents and ignoring these attributes. We present an approach for semantic parsing of technical questions that uses grammatical structure to extract these attributes as a baseline, and a CRF based model that can improve performance considerably in the presence of annotated data for training. We also demonstrate that combined with reasoning, these attributes help outperform retrieval baselines.