iFile as help-desk front-end

Aleksandr Milewski <[email protected]> Fri, 17 Oct 2003 13:10:19 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.mail.ifile.general
Message-ID <p05200f06bbb5fa7b918b@[10.0.1.85]>
I'm considering using ifile as a front-end for a helpdesk system, so 
ifile would sort inbound questions by subject.

It looks very promising, but I have a couple of questions.

1. What do the numbers reported by ifile -q really mean?
	I believe that for this system, simply giving up and routing to 
a human would be better than guessing wrong, so I'd like to have a 
"unknown" bin that collects the stuff that isn't matched well by 
ifile. I was under the impression that the numbers reported were a 
"quality of match" metric, but in cases where nothing matches 
(feeding Jabberwocky to ifile when it's been trained on an OS X FAQ) 
returns 0 for all categories. Is this a special case, and if I get 
exactly zero, or some very negative number, I should assume the match 
is poor?

2. Does a tiered implementation make sense?
	I may have hundreds of bins in this system, and it occurred to 
me that I could create a system with multiple instances of ifile 
doing a tiered filtering scheme. Something like training the first 
instance on Mac vs. Windows, and letting it filter into those two 
bins. Each of those gets fed into a second filter that classifies 
more specifically.
	Is there any advantage to this approach, or am I better off 
letting ifile sort things out over a large number of bins

Thanks in advance,
	Zandr
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Aleksandr Milewski                                              N6MOD
[email protected]                           http://www.milewski.org/