PERSONALIZED CONTACT CENTER EXPERIENCE THROUGH CUSTOMER FEEDBACK LOOP

Currently, organizations rely on contact centers for a number of functions including, for example, servicing customer inquiries, conducting market research, and selling new products. However, due to poorly designed interactive voice response (IVR) scripts and flows (including multiple menu hops), speech recognition issues in conversational IVR flows, inefficient routing, poor agent skill sets, etc., contact centers often have a poor reputation for handling customer calls. Within a contact center, the ability to immediately respond to customer feedback is a great challenge, and a lack of such an ability often results in customer dissatisfaction. Techniques are presented herein that support a priority matrix-based solution that is based on customer feedback and a past call history that will swiftly address the above-described problems. Under the presented techniques, a call may be routed according to a recommendation that is based on the order of importance of an issue where it needs the utmost attention, thus boosting customer satisfaction. Such an approach will provide interim relief to allow a contact center to pursue the time-consuming task of finding a solution to the underlying problems

Enhancing Self-Consistency and Performance of Pre-Trained Language Models through Natural Language Inference

While large pre-trained language models are powerful, their predictions often lack logical consistency across test inputs. For example, a state-of-the-art Macaw question-answering (QA) model answers 'Yes' to 'Is a sparrow a bird?' and 'Does a bird have feet?' but answers 'No' to 'Does a sparrow have feet?'. To address this failure mode, we propose a framework, Consistency Correction through Relation Detection, or ConCoRD, for boosting the consistency and accuracy of pre-trained NLP models using pre-trained natural language inference (NLI) models without fine-tuning or re-training. Given a batch of test inputs, ConCoRD samples several candidate outputs for each input and instantiates a factor graph that accounts for both the model's belief about the likelihood of each answer choice in isolation and the NLI model's beliefs about pair-wise answer choice compatibility. We show that a weighted MaxSAT solver can efficiently compute high-quality answer choices under this factor graph, improving over the raw model's predictions. Our experiments demonstrate that ConCoRD consistently boosts accuracy and consistency of off-the-shelf closed-book QA and VQA models using off-the-shelf NLI models, notably increasing accuracy of LXMERT on ConVQA by 5% absolute. See https://ericmitchell.ai/emnlp-2022-concord/ for code and data.Comment: 16 pages. EMNLP 2022 Camera Ready. See https://ericmitchell.ai/emnlp-2022-concord/ for code and dat

Diabetic ketoacidosis

Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is the most common acute hyperglycaemic emergency in people with diabetes mellitus. A diagnosis of DKA is confirmed when all of the three criteria are present — ‘D’, either elevated blood glucose levels or a family history of diabetes mellitus; ‘K’, the presence of high urinary or blood ketoacids; and ‘A’, a high anion gap metabolic acidosis. Early diagnosis and management are paramount to improve patient outcomes. The mainstays of treatment include restoration of circulating volume, insulin therapy, electrolyte replacement and treatment of any underlying precipitating event. Without optimal treatment, DKA remains a condition with appreciable, although largely preventable, morbidity and mortality. In this Primer, we discuss the epidemiology, pathogenesis, risk factors and diagnosis of DKA and provide practical recommendations for the management of DKA in adults and children

Evaluation and Improvements to Interfacial Curvature Predictions in interFoam

Improvements to the interfacial curvature of interFoam based on (i) the smoothing of the liquid fraction field and (ii) the creation of a signed distance function (ϕ-based) are implemented. While previous work in this area has focused on evaluating spurious currents and similar configurations, the tests implemented in this work are more applicable to sprays and hydrodynamic breakup problems. For the ϕ-based method, a dual approach is developed based on a geometric reconstruction of the interface at interfacial cells and the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation away from these cells. The more promising results are from this method, where the lack of convergence of Laplace pressure predictions existing in the standard version of interFoam is fixed, resulting in second-order convergence. Similar but less drastic improvements are observed for other exercises consisting of the oscillation of a droplet, a 2-phase Orr–Sommerfeld problem, the Rayleigh–Plateau instability, and the retraction of a liquid column. It is only when the dynamics are either entirely governed by surface tension or are heavily influenced by it that we see the need to substitute the standard interFoam curvature approach with a more accurate scheme. For more realistic problems, which naturally include more complicated dynamics, the difference between the standard approach and the ϕ-based approach is minimal

Evaluation and Improvements to Interfacial Curvature Predictions in <tt>interFoam</tt>

Improvements to the interfacial curvature of interFoam based on (i) the smoothing of the liquid fraction field and (ii) the creation of a signed distance function (ϕ-based) are implemented. While previous work in this area has focused on evaluating spurious currents and similar configurations, the tests implemented in this work are more applicable to sprays and hydrodynamic breakup problems. For the ϕ-based method, a dual approach is developed based on a geometric reconstruction of the interface at interfacial cells and the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation away from these cells. The more promising results are from this method, where the lack of convergence of Laplace pressure predictions existing in the standard version of interFoam is fixed, resulting in second-order convergence. Similar but less drastic improvements are observed for other exercises consisting of the oscillation of a droplet, a 2-phase Orr–Sommerfeld problem, the Rayleigh–Plateau instability, and the retraction of a liquid column. It is only when the dynamics are either entirely governed by surface tension or are heavily influenced by it that we see the need to substitute the standard interFoam curvature approach with a more accurate scheme. For more realistic problems, which naturally include more complicated dynamics, the difference between the standard approach and the ϕ-based approach is minimal

Estimation of Link Interference in Static Multi-hop Wireless Networks

We present a measurement-based study of interference among links in a static, IEEE 802.11, multi-hop wireless network. Interference is a key cause of performance degradation in such networks. To improve, or to even estimate the performance of these networks, one must have some knowledge of which links in the network interfere with one another, and to what extent. However, the problem of estimating the interference among links of a multihop wireless network is a challenging one. Accurate modeling of radio signal propagation is difficult since many environment and hardware-specific factors must be considered. Empirically testing every group of links is not practical: a network with n nodes can have O(n 2) links, and even if we consider only pairwise interference, we may have to potentially test O(n 4) pairs. Given these difficulties, much of the previous work on wireless networks has assumed that information about interference in the network is either known, or that it can be approximated using simple heuristics. We test these heuristics in our testbed and find them to be inaccurate. We then propose a simple, empirical estimation methodology that can predict pairwise interference using only O(n 2) measurements. Our methodology is applicable to any wireless network that uses omni-directional antennas. The predictions made by our methodology match well with the observed pairwise interference among links in our 22 node, 802.11-based testbed.