Comments on: The Fine Manual http://lr2.com/archives/2006/06/18/the-fine-manual/ Just another weblog Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:48:01 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 By: Marc http://lr2.com/archives/2006/06/18/the-fine-manual/#comment-3133 Marc Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:27:57 +0000 http://lr2.com/archives/2006/06/18/the-fine-manual/#comment-3133 Rudeness drives people away. On the other hand, asking questions about things that are in the manual is rude to the developers and other users. My response would probably be "I think that's in the manual or the FAQ". Anything more is not only rude but is taking too much of my time. I think a nice technological solution would be to have some kind of intelligent agent that scans the question and finds things that are in the manual or FAQ and auto responds with the answer. This is hard in the general case but might not be very hard to do for a small subset of frequently asked questions. I suspect that a Bayesian classifier could probably be trained to do this sort of classification. Rudeness drives people away. On the other hand, asking questions about things that are in the manual is rude to the developers and other users. My response would probably be “I think that’s in the manual or the FAQ”. Anything more is not only rude but is taking too much of my time.

I think a nice technological solution would be to have some kind of intelligent agent that scans the question and finds things that are in the manual or FAQ and auto responds with the answer. This is hard in the general case but might not be very hard to do for a small subset of frequently asked questions. I suspect that a Bayesian classifier could probably be trained to do this sort of classification.

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