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Towards Automated Customer Support

Published: 12 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Recent years have seen growing interest in conversational agents, such as chatbots, which are a very good fit for automated customer support because the domain in which they need to operate is narrow. This interest was in part inspired by recent advances in neural machine translation, esp. the rise of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) and attention-based models such as the Transformer, which have been applied to various other tasks and have opened new research directions in question answering, chatbots, and conversational systems. Still, in many cases, it might be feasible and even preferable to use simple information retrieval techniques. Thus, here we compare three different models: (i) a retrieval model, (ii) a sequence-to-sequence model with attention, and (iii) Transformer. Our experiments with the Twitter Customer Support Dataset, which contains over two million posts from customer support services of twenty major brands, show that the seq2seq model outperforms the other two in terms of semantics and word overlap.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Improving Conversational User Interfaces for Citizen Complaint Management through enhanced Contextual FeedbackProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665562(1-11)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Self-supervised Pre-training and Semi-supervised Learning for Extractive Dialog SummarizationCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543873.3587680(1069-1076)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • (2019)Identification of Conversational Intent Pattern Using Pattern-Growth Technique for Academic ChatbotMulti-disciplinary Trends in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-3-030-33709-4_24(263-270)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2019

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cover image Guide Proceedings
Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, and Applications: 18th International Conference, AIMSA 2018, Varna, Bulgaria, September 12–14, 2018, Proceedings
Sep 2018
296 pages
ISBN:978-3-319-99343-0
DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-99344-7
  • Editors:
  • Gennady Agre,
  • Josef van Genabith,
  • Thierry Declerck

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 12 September 2018

Author Tags

  1. Customer support
  2. Conversational agents
  3. Chatbots
  4. seq2seq
  5. Transformer
  6. IR

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View all
  • (2024)Improving Conversational User Interfaces for Citizen Complaint Management through enhanced Contextual FeedbackProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665562(1-11)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Self-supervised Pre-training and Semi-supervised Learning for Extractive Dialog SummarizationCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543873.3587680(1069-1076)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • (2019)Identification of Conversational Intent Pattern Using Pattern-Growth Technique for Academic ChatbotMulti-disciplinary Trends in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-3-030-33709-4_24(263-270)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2019

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