Behzad Golshan, George Mihaila, Chen Chen, Jonathan Engel, Alon Halevy, Yoshihiko Suhara, Wang-Chiew Tan, Michael Matuschek
We describe our experience in developing ConciergeBot,
an industrial strength question-answering bot for hotels. The
bot automatically suggests answers for information-seeking
questions over an input knowledge base of facts about the
hotel and its amenities. We demonstrate how ConciergeBot handles unique challenges that arise in our setting.
More specifically, we show how our system trains effective
models with limited training data, how it can be deployed
in different hotels with almost no hotel-specific tuning, and
how it manages heterogeneity in questions and data. Our experiments validate that ConciergeBot achieves high precision (78%) and good recall (71%) with as few as 1,300
questions for training purposes.