Detecting Bot-Answerable Questions in Ubuntu Chat

Ubuntu’s Internet Relay Chat technical support channel has bots that output specific messages in response to command words from other channel users. These messages can be used to answer frequently-asked questions instead of requiring an expert to (repeatedly) type a lengthy reply. We describe an approach to automatically distinguish bot-answerable questions, which would mitigate this problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on investigating question answering in a multiparticipant chat domain. Our results indicate that for some types of questions, supervised learning algorithms perform well on this task and, in addition, that character n-grams are a better representation than traditional bag-of-words for this task and domain.