Configure the Answer Bank System

The Answer Server configuration file contains information about the subcomponents in your Answer Bank systems.

For any Answer Bank system, you must configure the host and port details of the Answer Bank Agentstore, which is a specially configured IDOL Content component that stores your questions, answers, and question equivalence classes.

The following procedure describes how to configure the Answer Bank system in Answer Server.

There are also several optional parameters in the Answer Bank system, to allow you to modify the paths that Answer Bank uses for failed and queued actions, and how often it updates the Answer Bank usage statistics.

For more details about the configuration parameters for the Answer Bank system, refer to the Answer Server Reference.

To configure the Answer Bank System

  1. Open the Answer Server configuration file in a text editor.

  2. Find the [Systems] section, or create one if it does not exist. This section contains a list of systems, which refer to the associated configuration sections for each system.

  3. After any existing systems, add an entry for your new Answer Bank system. For example:

    [Systems]
    0=MyFactBank
    1=MyAnswerBank
  4. Create a configuration section for your Answer Bank system, with the name that you specified. For example, [MyAnswerBank].

  5. Set Type to AnswerBank. Set IDOLHost and IDOLACIPort to the host name and ACI Port of the IDOL Agentstore component that contains the questions and answers. For example:

    [MyAnswerBank]
    Type=answerbank
    IDOLHost=localhost
    IDOLACIPort=6000
  6. Save and close the configuration file.
  7. Restart Answer Server for your changes to take effect.
  8. (Optional) The Answer Server installation includes a default set of interrogative synonyms (such as "what time"/"when" or "where"/"which location") that you can use to help Answer Server answer questions that are posed in different ways. If you want to use the synonyms, first configure your synonym store as described in Use Synonyms to Expand Queries. Then use the DREADD index action to index the synonym rules into your IDOL AgentStore component. The synonyms are available in the resources/synonyms folder of the Answer Server installation. Micro Focus also recommends that you configure your AgentStore to use a stoplist provided in the resources/stoplists folder. Otherwise, many of the synonyms will be considered to be stopwords.