EasyAsk provides a tool that allows users to enter a question on a site such as, "Do you have any red dress shoes?" and have the answer returned in the form of a product selection and/or a selection of customized text information that matches the query. Lehigh Safety Shoes had been selling safety shoes over the web for some time when EasyAsk approached them last summer to prototype a new natural language customer assistance program. EasyAsk provides a front-end to SQL database searches as well as full-text queries. With complex products and broad assortments, the EasyAsk product requires a considerable degree of set-up to ensure it provides intelligent responses. We entered the question "do you have any shoes suitable for hiking?" on the EasyAsk search engine at Lehigh, and the answer came back "Nothing meets your exact requirements. Your may want to remove one of your criteria." We then tried entering just the word “hiking” using a traditional keyword search. We were rewarded with a selection of hiking boots. This simple example illustrates the difficulty of tuning a natural language tool to correctly interpret the questions asked. It may be easier to train users to ask simpler questions than it is to get computers to understand complex questions! "That's the limitation. Everybody phrases a sentence a little bit different, and if you don't ask it quite right, you may get a bad response," says Jim Codrea, President of Lehigh Valley Safety Shoe. The benefit of this type of tool, according to Codrea, is that "it can not only answer the question, it can suggest products that might suit the customers requirements." This type of assistance in selecting products is designed to save the customer time in finding the products that meet their needs. | 