Learnings from a pilot hybrid question answering system: CQAS: Case study based on a Singapore government agency's customer service centre

• Main Authors: LEE, Hui Shan, SHANKARARAMAN, Venky, OUH, Eng Lieh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Question Answering; Service Innovation; Citizen Services; Text Analytics; Asian Studies; Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7601; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8604/viewcontent/3543434.3543661.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The Singapore Government first released their digital government blueprint in 2018 with the key message for all their agencies to be "digital to the core and served with heart". With this push, agencies are moving towards human-centric digital services, especially for individual citizens. During COVID-19, Singapore government agencies introduced many COVID-19 digital initiatives resulting in more incoming inquiries from citizens to respective agencies. This surge in inquiries created the challenge on the agencies' end to meet service level agreements. One widely adopted solution is the use of chatbot technology that directly interfaces with the customer. However, several organisations have faced backlash from the citizens or customers when such chatbots cannot answer or give inappropriate answers to the questions. Hence this research takes a different approach to address this challenge using a question answering (QA) system that supports the CSOs to help answer the citizen inquiries more efficiently.This paper shares our learnings from implementing the pilot QA system; the Citizen Question Answering System (CQAS) was built using a hybrid QA approach that combines techniques from Natural Language Process QA, Knowledge-based QA and Information Retrieval QA. We also highlight the essential learnings in implementing QA systems within a government agency. The research will further share how these learnings could inform the adoption of QA systems in a government setting. The subsequent research following this paper will then focus on conducting a user study with the CSOs to validate further the benefits of this pilot QA system, which is not covered in this paper.