Questions posted in the wrong practice area? Help us help you.
For all you Avvo Answer participants our there… ever wonder how a question gets assigned to a particular practice area? Or maybe wonder why that DUI question was posted in Brain Injury?
Well, I’ll tell you.
We use what’s called a “classifier” to help the consumer pick the practice area their question belongs in. Given a block of text, the classifier returns the practice areas that most likely describe that text. To seed the classifier we mapped several thousand questions to practice areas by hand (btw, thanks for doing that Linnea :).
This classifier allows us to map questions to practice areas without human interaction and instantly. That allows us to send email notifications to participating lawyers as soon as the question is asked. That leads to quicker answers and a better experience for the consumer and the lawyer.
The classifier is pretty good, but it’s far from perfect, and we hate it when you receive a notification about a Child Custody question being posted in Car Accident as much (if not more) than you do. So, we’ve add a little feature to allow lawyers to correct the practice area for questions. If you see a question that is in the wrong practice area, fix it and we’ll use that data to make our classifier smarter which will make your question-answering experience better.
Here’s what it looks like (note that you have to be logged in as a lawyer to see this feature):
And then the form…
