A predictive approach to help-desk response generation

We are developing a corpus-based approach for the prediction of help-desk responses from features in customers' emails, where responses are represented at two levels of granularity: document and sentence. We present an automatic and human-based evaluation of our system's responses. The automatic evaluation involves textual comparisons between generated responses and responses composed by help-desk operators. Our results showthat both levels of granularity produce good responses, addressing inquiries of different kinds. The human-based evaluation measures response informativeness, and confirms our conclusion that both levels of granularity produce useful responses.