Best practices: Training Answer Bot to find the right articles more easily

The easiest way to understand how Answer Bot works is to think about how a child might learn a language. It develops an understanding of language based on hundreds of thousands of interactions where similar questions were used and a positive or negative result occurred. Luckily it doesn't take Answer Bot years to learn - rather, it already understands the question and answer language quite well. It can interpret the intent based on context - but importantly, it needs this context in order to be effective. Simply throwing keywords at it doesn't help it find the right article - much the same as a person wouldn't be able to respond with a logical answer if you simply spoke to them in keywords - although this would be quite amusing in real life.

Understanding how Answer Bot was 'taught' is important because we can now use this when we are attempting to 'train' it, or at least try and get the right articles being suggested.

This article includes the following tips:

• Retain as much question context as possible
• Keep the article focused on a single problem
• Use the "Improve" option in the agent interface

Retain as much question context as possible

If you can retain as much similar phrasing of the original question within the article, the contextual match will be far better - e.g., the question "I Can't log in - how can I reset my password?" should result in an article with the title "How do I reset my password so I can log in?" and content that is as contextually relevant to the question as possible. Ultimately, this is the best approach for achieving success with Answer Bot

Keep the article focused on a single problem

A long list of FAQs won't help Answer Bot find the right answer. Every article should deal with one problem and one solution only. Can break an article with multiple FAQs into separate articles and group them together in an FAQ section? It's important to note that, Answer Bot does place much greater emphasis on the first 75 words of the article, so it's critical to place as much contextually-relevant information into the top of the article as possible.

Use the "Improve" option in the agent interface

While this may not have an immediate effect on the underlying model that Answer Bot uses, it does help define where the threshold is placed for articles that are relevant or irrelevant.