Cognitive system to achieve human-level accuracy in automated assignment of helpdesk email tickets

Ticket assignment/dispatch is a crucial part of service delivery business with lot of scope for automation and optimization. In this paper, we present an end-to-end automated helpdesk email ticket assignment system, which is also offered as a service. The objective of the system is to determine the nature of the problem mentioned in an incoming email ticket and then automatically dispatch it to an appropriate resolver group (or team) for resolution. The proposed system uses an ensemble classifier augmented with a configurable rule engine. While design of classifier that is accurate is one of the main challenges, we also need to address the need of designing a system that is robust and adaptive to changing business needs. We discuss some of the main design challenges associated with email ticket assignment automation and how we solve them. The design decisions for our system are driven by high accuracy, coverage, business continuity, scalability and optimal usage of computational resources. Our system has been deployed in production of three major service providers and currently assigning over 40,000 emails per month, on an average, with an accuracy close to 90% and covering at least 90% of email tickets. This translates to achieving human-level accuracy and results in a net saving of about 23000 man-hours of effort per annum

Evaluation of Deep Convolutional Nets for Document Image Classification and Retrieval

This paper presents a new state-of-the-art for document image classification and retrieval, using features learned by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In object and scene analysis, deep neural nets are capable of learning a hierarchical chain of abstraction from pixel inputs to concise and descriptive representations. The current work explores this capacity in the realm of document analysis, and confirms that this representation strategy is superior to a variety of popular hand-crafted alternatives. Experiments also show that (i) features extracted from CNNs are robust to compression, (ii) CNNs trained on non-document images transfer well to document analysis tasks, and (iii) enforcing region-specific feature-learning is unnecessary given sufficient training data. This work also makes available a new labelled subset of the IIT-CDIP collection, containing 400,000 document images across 16 categories, useful for training new CNNs for document analysis