Algorithm::TicketClusterer is a perl5 module for retrieving
Excel-stored tickets that are most similar to a new ticket.
Tickets are commonly used in software services industry and
customer support businesses to record requests for service,
product complaints, user feedback, and so on.

Identifying old tickets similar to a new ticket is made
challenging by the fact that folks who submit tickets often
write them quickly and informally.  The informal style of
writing means that different people may use different
colloquial terms to describe the same thing. And the
quickness associated with their submission causes the
tickets to frequently contain spelling and other errors such
as conjoined words, fragmentation of long words, and so on.
This module is an attempt at dealing with these challenges.
That different people may use different words for the same
thing is dealt with by using WordNet to expand the tickets
with synonyms in order to ground the tickets in a common
vocabulary.

This module requires the following three modules:

    Spreadsheet::ParseExcel                                                             
    Spreadsheet::XLSX                                                                   
    WordNet::QueryData                                                                  

the first for extracting information from the old-style
Excel sheets that are commonly used for storing tickets, the
second for extracting the same information from the
new-style Excel sheets, and the third for interfacing with
WordNet for extracting the synonyms and antonyms for the
words in the tickets.

For installation, do the usual

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install

if you have root access.  If not, 

    perl Makefile.PL prefix=/some/other/directory/
    make
    make test
    make install

Contact:

Avinash Kak  

email: kak@purdue.edu

Please place the string "TicketClusterer" in the subject
line if you wish to write to the author.  Any feedback
regarding this module would be highly appreciated.
