"ASK ANNA":
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* Brief description and AI targeted area:

If you ever shop online on ikea.com, you may be directed, at some point, to the "ask Anna" service. Anna is an online virtual assistant that is supposed to help you through your shopping at ikea, or answer your questions, if any, about ikea. 
Unfortunately, this system is not perfect (no system is) and Anna gives up extremely fast and redirects you to the email page where you can send a note to actual employees of the customer service of ikea. This is a little bit disappointing...

What you are expected to do in this project, is to develop your own "ask Anna" service that has to be more efficient than the original one.

This project involves dealing with natural language processing (somehow: it does not have to be very advanced, but enough so that your system is efficient), but also with information processing and deductive systems.

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* Description of the objectives and tasks:

By the end of the project, you will have:
- written a short tutorial about help systems and how they are related to AI: this tutorial will 	 be handed out to all students in the class; * this tutorial should be ready by the end of 	  week 4 of the project timeline;
- implemented an assistant system, and you will demonstrate it, by testing it with several 	   people, and ultimately with your instructor. 

You will also have to write a report in which you will include:
- an introduction: presenting the problem you plan to address, and explain how you will tackle 		it; explain how it is related to AI and what specific area it is related to;
- the description of your team: names of the students, tasks assignment (contribution of each one), 	timeline of your work;
- the description of your system:
	* which method(s) you used and how you implemented it (justify your choice and make your 		descriptions clear)
	* what strategy(ies) you used to make your system efficient: explain why your system is 	more efficient than the original "ask Anna";
- the report of your testing your system:
	* with a sample of users;
	* does your system meet your expectations? why?
- a discussion of what went wrong and why: self-criticism;
- a conclusion: synthesis of your work, future work directions (what you would do if you were 		given more time on your project).

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* Names of the students, and respective responsabilities: 

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