Abstract: A method, a system, and an article are provided for automatically responding to requests from users in an online messaging system. An example method includes: providing an online messaging system; receiving a new request from a user in the online messaging system; determining that the new request is suitable for an automatic response to the user based on at least one of a request category, a request length, or a request sentiment; retrieving, from a database, a previous automatic response associated with a previous request that is similar to the new request; and providing the retrieved previous automatic response to the user in the online messaging system.

Abstract: A method, a system, and an article are provided for automatically posting answers to questions generated by users of a chat room. In one example, a set of chat messages is used to develop a database of question and answer pairs. When a subsequent chat message is identified as being similar or identical to a question in the database, the corresponding answer to the question can be retrieved from the database and posted in the chat room.