Improving Specificity in Review Response Generation with Data-Driven Data Filtering

Tannon Kew, Martin Volk


Abstract
Responding to online customer reviews has become an essential part of successfully managing and growing a business both in e-commerce and the hospitality and tourism sectors. Recently, neural text generation methods intended to assist authors in composing responses have been shown to deliver highly fluent and natural looking texts. However, they also tend to learn a strong, undesirable bias towards generating overly generic, one-size-fits-all outputs to a wide range of inputs. While this often results in ‘safe’, high-probability responses, there are many practical settings in which greater specificity is preferable. In this work we examine the task of generating more specific responses for online reviews in the hospitality domain by identifying generic responses in the training data, filtering them and fine-tuning the generation model. We experiment with a range of data-driven filtering methods and show through automatic and human evaluation that, despite a 60% reduction in the amount of training data, filtering helps to derive models that are capable of generating more specific, useful responses.
Anthology ID:
2022.ecnlp-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 5)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Shervin Malmasi, Oleg Rokhlenko, Nicola Ueffing, Ido Guy, Eugene Agichtein, Surya Kallumadi
Venue:
ECNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
121–133
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2022.ecnlp-1.15/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.ecnlp-1.15
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tannon Kew and Martin Volk. 2022. Improving Specificity in Review Response Generation with Data-Driven Data Filtering. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 5), pages 121–133, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Specificity in Review Response Generation with Data-Driven Data Filtering (Kew & Volk, ECNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2022.ecnlp-1.15.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2022.ecnlp-1.15.mp4
Code
 zurichnlp/specific_hospo_respo