@inproceedings{liao-fares-2021-practical,
    title = "A Practical 2-step Approach to Assist Enterprise Question-Answering Live Chat",
    author = "Liao, Ling-Yen  and
      Fares, Tarec",
    editor = "Li, Haizhou  and
      Levow, Gina-Anne  and
      Yu, Zhou  and
      Gupta, Chitralekha  and
      Sisman, Berrak  and
      Cai, Siqi  and
      Vandyke, David  and
      Dethlefs, Nina  and
      Wu, Yan  and
      Li, Junyi Jessy",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = jul,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Singapore and Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2021.sigdial-1.48/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.48",
    pages = "457--468",
    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."
}