Using customer service dialogues for satisfaction analysis with context-assisted multiple instance learning

Customers ask questions and customer service staffs answer their questions, which is the basic service model via multi-turn customer service (CS) dialogues on E-commerce platforms. Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis, namely satisfaction polarity classification (e.g., well satisfied, met and unsatisfied) and sentimental utterance identification (e.g., positive, neutral and negative). In this paper, we conduct a pilot study on the task of service satisfaction analysis (SSA) based on multi-turn CS dialogues. We propose an extensible Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (CAMIL) model to predict the sentiments of all the customer utterances and then aggregate those sentiments into service satisfaction polarity. After that, we propose a novel Context Clue Matching Mechanism (CCMM) to enhance the representations of all customer utterances with their matched context clues, i.e., sentiment and reasoning clues. We construct two CS dialogue datasets from a top E-commerce platform. Extensive experimental results are presented and contrasted against a few previous models to demonstrate the efficacy of our model

What influences the speed of prototyping? An empirical investigation of twenty software startups

It is essential for startups to quickly experiment business ideas by building tangible prototypes and collecting user feedback on them. As prototyping is an inevitable part of learning for early stage software startups, how fast startups can learn depends on how fast they can prototype. Despite of the importance, there is a lack of research about prototyping in software startups. In this study, we aimed at understanding what are factors influencing different types of prototyping activities. We conducted a multiple case study on twenty European software startups. The results are two folds, firstly we propose a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups. Secondly, we identify factors occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in early stage software startups. The factors are grouped into (1) artifacts, (2) team competence, (3) collaboration, (4) customer and (5) process dimensions. To speed up a startups progress at the early stage, it is important to incorporate the learning objective into a well-defined collaborative approach of prototypingComment: This is the author's version of the work. Copyright owner's version can be accessed at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57633-6_2, XP2017, Cologne, German

A reflective characterisation of occasional user

This work revisits established user classifications and aims to characterise a historically unspecified user category, the Occasional User (OU). Three user categories, novice, intermediate and expert, have dominated the work of user interface (UI) designers, researchers and educators for decades. These categories were created to conceptualise user's needs, strategies and goals around the 80s. Since then, UI paradigm shifts, such as direct manipulation and touch, along with other advances in technology, gave new access to people with little computer knowledge. This fact produced a diversification of the existing user categories not observed in the literature review of traditional classification of users. The findings of this work include a new characterisation of the occasional user, distinguished by user's uncertainty of repetitive use of an interface and little knowledge about its functioning. In addition, the specification of the OU, together with principles and recommendations will help UI community to informatively design for users without requiring a prospective use and previous knowledge of the UI. The OU is an essential type of user to apply user-centred design approach to understand the interaction with technology as universal, accessible and transparent for the user, independently of accumulated experience and technological era that users live in

Managing organizational learning ambidexterity: An exploratory study of Australian large service organizations

Organizational ambidexterity is about developing necessary organizational capabilities to compete in new and changing markets that enable organizations to survive in the face of dynamic external environments. It is about finding a balance between exploring new knowledge and exploiting existing knowledge or capabilities. The research on ambidexterity has offered different mechanisms for pursuing ambidexterity, and has highlighted the pivotal role of organizations’ senior teams and leadership behaviors in balancing the conflicting demands of exploration and exploitation. Research has also shown that no universal best practices should be sought to resolve the dilemma but instead leaders need to understand the situational context to enable them to develop the capability to effectively adjust the internal context of their organizations to the demands of the dynamic external environment or context. However, exactly how these leaders actually manage the interfaces of exploration and exploitation and the inevitable conflicts that arise from these two conflicting activities in practice is less clear. This study tries to address this gap by using an organizational learning lens to investigate what leaders actually do to achieve ambidexterity. Research has shown that in terms of responding to the effects of the external context or environment, leaders need to pursue both cost-leadership (exploitation) and differentiation (exploration) strategies simultaneously to enable their organizations to compete competitively; they need to avoid “a stuck in the middle strategy” where they fail to successfully pursue either strategy. The aims of this thesis are thus twofold. The first aim is to examine the impact of external environments or contexts (i.e., competition, customer demands, development of technology, strategic partners, and government) on exploratory and exploitative innovation that organizations pursue. The second aim of this thesis, using Crossan et al.’s (1999) 4I framework, is to investigate how leaders facilitate organizational learning ambidexterity for the innovation they are pursuing. Leaders need to provide internal contextual support (i.e. strategy, structure, organizational culture, and resources) to facilitate learning in each of 4I phases in order to pursue innovation. Exploration of new knowledge (idea generation) is often associated with the intuition and interpretation phases of the 4I organizational learning process. Conversely, exploitation of existing knowledge (implementation) is closely linked to the process of institutionalization. One of the most challenging phases of the 4I framework is in the integrating phase, which requires trade-offs, particularly in resource allocation with individuals or groups often competing for scarce resources to explore and exploit. A qualitative approach was adopted to address the research aims of this study. Case studies of four large Australian service organizations were undertaken in an exploratory analysis of the complex phenomenon of ambidexterity for innovation to account for contextual differences. The reason for choosing large service organizations is that service organizations need to continuously explore new approaches to provide better service to their customers, but being large, these organizations often find it difficult to pursue innovation due to the complexity of their structures and bureaucracies. The service organizations studied are a regional private bank, a public university, a police academy, and a private hospital (having public-private partnership arrangements). These organizations had or are engaged in innovation. For the purpose of this study, innovation does not refer only to new services or practices in the industry but can also refer to something new to the organization being observed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 29 organizational members from the four organizations, mostly from the top and middle managerial levels due to the significant importance of the leadership role in ambidextrous organizations. The interviews were complemented by the use of documentary sources, such as the organizations’ official websites, annual reports, and press releases. Interview data was classified thematically based on the predetermined framework of factors in the external and internal contexts and compared to the corresponding documentary sources to build interpretation for the within and cross-case analyses. The semi-structured interviews also allowed for any new or emerging themes to be considered. Findings emerging from this research indicate that a resource-constrained environment has compelled the four service organizations to achieve increased efficiency, which is often associated with process innovation or exploitation. This was a common theme across the organizations despite their different contexts. Interestingly, for the researched organizations, exploration in a resource-constrained environment can also relate to significant or radical process improvements to increase efficiency and therefore exploration is not simply about developing new products or services. For example, the researched organizations strived to achieve higher efficiency by pursuing radical technological-based innovation and adopting administrative innovation i.e. structural reform. Nevertheless, the cases revealed that while these organizations strived to pursue both cost-leadership (efficiency) and differentiation strategies simultaneously, they tended to focus on efficiency (exploitation) rather than on product differentiation (exploration) in the face of a resource–constrained environment. However, the relative optimal level of or balance between exploration and exploitation varied between these organizations due to their contextual differences. The tendency of focusing on cost-leadership or efficiency was higher among the public organizations (e.g. the public university) compared to their private counterparts (e.g. the regional private bank). Conversely, the competitive pressure for product innovation or differentiation was higher in private than public organizations. This thesis contributes to the discussion on organizational ambidexterity by demonstrating how the external context affects what leaders actually do to provide internal contextual support in order to facilitate organizational learning for both exploratory and exploitative innovation and thus achieve ambidexterity. It demonstrates that leaders should use the framework proposed in this study to consider their organization-specific contexts in managing ambidexterity for innovation because the combinations of and interplay between external and internal contexts vary among different organizations

Affect between Humans and Conversational Agents: A Review and Organizing Frameworks

Conversational agents (CAs), which communicate naturally with humans, are being developed and employed for a variety of tasks. Interactions between humans and CAs induce affect, which is vital to the adoption and performance of CAs. Yet, there is a lack of cumulative understanding of existing research on affect in human-CA interaction. Motivated thus, this article presents a systematic review of empirical IS and HCI studies on such affect, its antecedents and consequences. Besides conducting descriptive analysis of the studies, we also divide them into two broad categories – emotion-related, and those related to other (more persistent) affective responses. We present organizing frameworks for both categories, which complement each other. Through the review and frameworks, we contribute towards attaining a holistic understanding of extant research on human-CA interaction, identifying gaps in prior knowledge, and outlining future research directions. Last, we describe our plan for extending this work to gain additional insights

Quality Management of Learning Management Systems: A User Experience Perspective

Learning Management Systems (LMS) have been the main vehicle for delivering and managing e-learning courses in educational, business, governmental and vocational learning settings. Since the mid-nineties there is a plethora of LMS in the market with a vast array of features. The increasing complexity of these platforms makes LMS evaluation a hard and demanding process that requires a lot of knowledge, time, and effort. Nearly 50% of respondents in recent surveys have indicated they seek to change their existing LMS primarily due to user experience issues. Yet the vast majority of the extant literature focuses only on LMS capabilities in relation to administration and management of teaching and learning processes. In this study the authors try to build a conceptual framework and evaluation model of LMS through the lens of User Experience (UX) research and practice, an epistemology that is quite important but currently neglected in the e-learning domain. They conducted an online survey with 446 learning professionals, and from the results, developed a new UX-oriented evaluation model with four dimensions: pragmatic quality, authentic learning, motivation and engagement, and autonomy and relatedness. Their discussion on findings includes some ideas for future research