A Practical 2-step Approach to Assist Enterprise Question-Answering Live Chat

Ling-Yen Liao, Tarec Fares


Abstract
Live chat in customer service platforms is critical for serving clients online. For multi-turn question-answering live chat, typical Question Answering systems are single-turn and focus on factoid questions; alternatively, modeling as goal-oriented dialogue limits us to narrower domains. Motivated by these challenges, we develop a new approach based on a framework from a different discipline: Community Question Answering. Specifically, we opt to divide and conquer the task into two sub-tasks: (1) Question-Question Similarity, where we gain more than 9% absolute improvement in F1 over baseline; and (2) Answer Utterances Extraction, where we achieve a high F1 score of 87% for this new sub-task. Further, our user engagement metrics reveal how the enterprise support representatives benefit from the 2-step approach we deployed to production.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigdial-1.48
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2021
Address:
Singapore and Online
Editors:
Haizhou Li, Gina-Anne Levow, Zhou Yu, Chitralekha Gupta, Berrak Sisman, Siqi Cai, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Yan Wu, Junyi Jessy Li
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
457–468
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.48
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.48
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ling-Yen Liao and Tarec Fares. 2021. A Practical 2-step Approach to Assist Enterprise Question-Answering Live Chat. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 457–468, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Practical 2-step Approach to Assist Enterprise Question-Answering Live Chat (Liao & Fares, SIGDIAL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.48.pdf
Video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSH8bPlXM88