COTA: Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Customer Support through Ranking and Deep Networks

For a company looking to provide delightful user experiences, it is of paramount importance to take care of any customer issues. This paper proposes COTA, a system to improve speed and reliability of customer support for end users through automated ticket classification and answers selection for support representatives. Two machine learning and natural language processing techniques are demonstrated: one relying on feature engineering (COTA v1) and the other exploiting raw signals through deep learning architectures (COTA v2). COTA v1 employs a new approach that converts the multi-classification task into a ranking problem, demonstrating significantly better performance in the case of thousands of classes. For COTA v2, we propose an Encoder-Combiner-Decoder, a novel deep learning architecture that allows for heterogeneous input and output feature types and injection of prior knowledge through network architecture choices. This paper compares these models and their variants on the task of ticket classification and answer selection, showing model COTA v2 outperforms COTA v1, and analyzes their inner workings and shortcomings. Finally, an A/B test is conducted in a production setting validating the real-world impact of COTA in reducing issue resolution time by 10 percent without reducing customer satisfaction

A million tweets are worth a few points : tuning transformers for customer service tasks

In online domain-specific customer service applications, many companies struggle to deploy advanced NLP models successfully, due to the limited availability of and noise in their datasets. While prior research demonstrated the potential of migrating large open-domain pretrained models for domain-specific tasks, the appropriate (pre)training strategies have not yet been rigorously evaluated in such social media customer service settings, especially under multilingual conditions. We address this gap by collecting a multilingual social media corpus containing customer service conversations (865k tweets), comparing various pipelines of pretraining and finetuning approaches, applying them on 5 different end tasks. We show that pretraining a generic multilingual transformer model on our in-domain dataset, before finetuning on specific end tasks, consistently boosts performance, especially in non-English settings

An Analysis of Writing Tasks in English Textbook for Office Administration Students entitled Bahasa Inggris SMA/MA/SMK/MAK Kelas XI

Vocational High School students majoring in Office Administration will be required to do writing tasks when they work in companies after graduating from school. This study aimed at finding out the appropriateness of writing tasks in English textbook entitled Bahasa Inggris SMA/MA/SMK/MAK Kelas XI for Office Administration students at Eleventh Grade. Content analysis method was employed in this study and the analysis was based on Nunan’s (2004) theory of task components (goal, input, procedure) and Hyland’s (2003) theory of writing procedures (graphology, scaffolding, composing). The results indicated that the textbook is inappropriate for Office Administration students. Among the three components of writing task, writing goals and texts (input) in the analyzed textbook do not correspond to the ones required by Office Administration students. The goals and input in the textbook are related to daily life situations, while the students are supposed to write business documents. In terms of procedure, the textbook leaves out graphology tasks and only provides the tasks for scaffolding and composing. Scaffolding has four categories: language familiarization (found in Chapter 1, 2, 5, 6), model analysis and manipulation (not found in any chapters), controlled composition based on model (found in Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8), guided composition (found in Chapter 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8). Then, composing has two categories: composition heuristics (found in Chapter 4 and 8) and extended writing (found in Chapter 3 and 5). These findings imply that the needs arise to select more relevant writing tasks for Office Administration students or design new writing materials for the students

TaDaa: real time Ticket Assignment Deep learning Auto Advisor for customer support, help desk, and issue ticketing systems

This paper proposes TaDaa: Ticket Assignment Deep learning Auto Advisor, which leverages the latest Transformers models and machine learning techniques quickly assign issues within an organization, like customer support, help desk and alike issue ticketing systems. The project provides functionality to 1) assign an issue to the correct group, 2) assign an issue to the best resolver, and 3) provide the most relevant previously solved tickets to resolvers. We leverage one ticketing system sample dataset, with over 3k+ groups and over 10k+ resolvers to obtain a 95.2% top 3 accuracy on group suggestions and a 79.0% top 5 accuracy on resolver suggestions. We hope this research will greatly improve average issue resolution time on customer support, help desk, and issue ticketing systems

Flames recognition for opinion mining

The emerging world-wide e-society creates new ways of interaction between people with different cultures and backgrounds. Communication systems as forums, blogs, and comments are easily accessible to end users. In this context, user generated content management revealed to be a difficult but necessary task. Studying and interpreting user generated data/text available on the Internet is a complex and time consuming task for any human analyst. This study proposes an interdisciplinary approach to modelling the flaming phenomena (hot, aggressive discussions) in online Italian forums. The model is based on the analysis of psycho/cognitive/linguistic interaction modalities among web communities' participants, state-of-the art machine learning techniques and natural language processing technology. Virtual communities' administrators, moderators and users could benefit directly from this research. A further positive outcome of this research is the opportunity to better understand and model the dynamics of web forums as the base for developing opinion mining applications focused on commercial applications

Text mining analysis roadmap (TMAR) for service research

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a step-by-step text mining analysis roadmap (TMAR) for service researchers. The paper provides guidance on how to choose between alternative tools, using illustrative examples from a range of business contexts. Design/methodology/approach The authors provide a six-stage TMAR on how to use text mining methods in practice. At each stage, the authors provide a guiding question, articulate the aim, identify a range of methods and demonstrate how machine learning and linguistic techniques can be used in practice with illustrative examples drawn from business, from an array of data types, services and contexts. Findings At each of the six stages, this paper demonstrates useful insights that result from the text mining techniques to provide an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon and actionable insights for research and practice. Originality/value There is little research to guide scholars and practitioners on how to gain insights from the extensive “big data” that arises from the different data sources. In a first, this paper addresses this important gap highlighting the advantages of using text mining to gain useful insights for theory testing and practice in different service contexts. </jats:sec