In this guide, you will discover how to:
- Enhance the quality of your service responses by incorporating synonyms.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of synonym additions using the Test pane’s inspect feature.
This tutorial demonstrates how synonyms can significantly improve the quality of service your system provides. Often, users phrase their queries using different words, synonyms, or acronyms. If your system isn’t equipped to recognize these variations, users may not receive accurate or helpful responses. By leveraging synonyms through the Authoring API, you can bridge this gap and ensure a smoother, more effective service experience. Let’s explore how adding synonyms for keywords can elevate your service quality.
The Impact of Synonyms on Service Interactions
To illustrate the power of synonyms in improving service, let’s consider adding the following terms and their variations:
| Word | Alterations |
|---|---|
| fix problems | troubleshoot, diagnostic |
| whiteboard | white board, white canvas |
| bluetooth | blue tooth, BT |
This can be implemented using the following JSON structure via the Authoring API:
{ "synonyms": [ { "alterations": [ "fix problems", "troubleshoot", "diagnostic", ] }, { "alterations": [ "whiteboard", "white board", "white canvas" ] }, { "alterations": [ "bluetooth", "blue tooth", "BT" ] } ] }Let’s examine a specific example. For the question and answer pair “Fix problems with Surface Pen”, we’ll compare the system’s response to a query using the synonym “troubleshoot” both before and after adding the synonym.
Demonstrating Service Improvement: Before Synonym Addition
Initially, without “troubleshoot” recognized as a synonym for “fix problems,” a query like “How to troubleshoot your surface pen” yields a lower confidence score. This indicates a less accurate and potentially less helpful service response.
Demonstrating Service Improvement: After Synonym Addition
However, once “troubleshoot” is added as a synonym for “fix problems,” the same query “How to troubleshoot your surface pen” now receives a significantly higher confidence score. This improvement signifies a more relevant and accurate service response, directly enhancing the user experience. By incorporating synonyms, you ensure that your service is more adaptable to user language, leading to better outcomes and greater user satisfaction.
Key Considerations for Effective Synonym Use in Service Systems
It’s important to keep the following points in mind when implementing synonyms to improve your service:
- Case Insensitivity: Synonyms are not case-sensitive. “Whiteboard” and “whiteboard” are treated the same.
- Stop Words: Be cautious when adding stop words as synonyms. Stop words are common words (like “it,” “the,” “and”) that are often filtered out in query processing. Using them as synonyms can lead to unexpected behavior. You can find a list of stop words here. For example, using “IT” as a synonym for “Information Technology” might not work as expected because “IT” is a stop word.
- Order Irrelevance: The order in which you add synonyms does not matter. The system does not rely on synonym order for any logic.
- Project Requirement: Synonyms can only be added to a project that already contains at least one question and answer pair.
- Overlapping Synonyms: Avoid overlapping synonym sets between different alteration groups. This can lead to unpredictable results and is not recommended.
- Special Characters: Special characters are not permitted within synonyms. For hyphenated words like “COVID-19,” the system treats them the same as “COVID 19.” “Space” is considered a term separator. The following special characters are not allowed:
| Special character | Symbol |
|---|---|
| Comma | , |
| Question mark | ? |
| Colon | : |
| Semicolon | ; |
| Double quotation mark | “ |
| Single quotation mark | ‘ |
| Open parenthesis | ( |
| Close parenthesis | ) |
| Open brace | { |
| Close brace | } |
| Open bracket | [ |
| Close bracket | ] |
| Hyphen/dash | – |
| Plus sign | + |
| Period | . |
| Forward slash | / |
| Exclamation mark | ! |
| Asterisk | * |
| Underscore | _ |
| Ampersand | @ |
| Hash | # |
By carefully considering these factors and strategically implementing synonyms, you can significantly enhance the quality of service and user satisfaction.
