Radialpoint (www.radialpoint.com) is a Montreal-based software company with deep experience in providing products and services for consumer technology support. We’re engaged in research and development of a new semantic IR system (a vertical search engine) designed to provide accurate knowledge to help resolve consumer technology issues. To this end, we’re researching possibilities of combining Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to discover and organize knowledge relevant to tech support.

We’re also collecting search queries and click-though data from live tech support sessions performed by several call centres. This data helps us to determine the real-life information needs as well as to focus the web crawler to collect the most relevant content for the search index.

We will present some early findings on search query clustering and discuss challenges and research topics that may help in creation of such a system. We would also discuss our current work on a semantic pipeline processing of knowledge bases, and some preliminary results on adding entity annotations to ElasticSearch index.

Besides the technical aspects of this work, Radialpoint is interested in discussing opportunities for collaboration with UdeM and their students.