?Infobots? are small-scale natural language question answering systems
drawing inspiration from ELIZA-type systems. Their key distinguishing feature
is the extraction of meaning from users? queries without the use of syntactic
or semantic representations. Three approaches to identifying the users?
intended meanings were investigated: keyword based systems, Jaro-based string
similarity algorithms and matching based on very shallow syntactic analysis.
These were measured against a corpus of queries contributed by users of
aWWW-hosted infobot for responding to questions about applications to MSc
courses. The most effective system was Jaro with stemmed input (78.57%). It
also was able to process ungrammatical input and offer scalability.
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