Auto answer to "Where should I post X?"

[chunlou]

Just toying with the idea of "Where should I post X?" page or search bar where a user types generally what he wants to do, such as "I have a Perl question," "I have some cool code I want to share," "I have trouble with the Perlmonks site," etc, and the search interface will return him a suggested section, SoPW, Meditations, etc., or a list of ranked ones.

I guess we could in theory inplement it by creating a bunch of dummy nodes titled "SoPW", "Meditations", etc. with contents/keywords solely characterized the titles/sections. Use the Super Search engine just to search those nodes when requested from "Where should I post X?" and return the corresponding title(s).

In other words, we simply modify and disguise the external behavior of Super Search a little bit from within some wrapper. Of course the search should probably be a "fuzzy" one (treating all same-stem words or even synonyms as the same word that appears in a dummy node).

I was trying to experiment the idea using Google search since they can search just a particular site. But the pages have to be indexed by them first in order for the search to work. Not sure any way around it.

Another model will be a decision tree based one, like the one in AI::DecisionTree. In a sense, it's more accurate and deterministic but the UI will be a bit more cumbersome since it will have to ask the user a series to questions leading to an answer.

Well, basically, it's just another Expert System.

[sauoq]

What problem would this address? For the most part, the section names themselves do a pretty good job of communicating the appropriate location for various content. In the relatively rare cases where content is placed in an inappropriate section, the moderation system does a good job of flagging those posts and the editors do a great job cleaning them up.

Update: Besides, how about just asking the question in the CB? It's generally monitored by several "expert systems" that are very good at interpreting natural language questions and responding with reasonable answers. ;-)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

[tcf22]

I agree completly. Most posts are very straight forward in where they belong. If a post is that close to the borderline, that you can't tell where is should go, then in most cases it probably won't matter in which of the sections it is posted, and if it does then the editors will fix it.

[artist]

Even if the idea is good in theory, one should try to figure out what it can accomplish what the existing human base cannot do with reasonable efforts.

The ability of the existing human base is often neglected the enthusiasm and influence of automation everywhere theory.

It is our common experience that we don't like to be asked questions everytime when actually we have a question. So what you suggest may not work.

If you are really interested in building expert system, I propose to search wider areas.

artist

[jdporter]

You've probably seen this, but just in case:

Where should I post X?

Also, I've tried to put together a short synopsis of this and other basic PerlMonks usage guides at:

PerlMonks for the Absolute Beginner

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.