David Konopnicki


2022

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Conversational Search with Mixed-Initiative - Asking Good Clarification Questions backed-up by Passage Retrieval
Yosi Mass | Doron Cohen | Asaf Yehudai | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering

We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and user response, in order to clarify her information needs. We focus on the task of selecting the next clarification question, given conversation context. Our method leverages passage retrieval from background content to fine-tune two deep-learning models for ranking candidate clarification questions. We evaluated our method on two different use-cases. The first is an open domain conversational search in a large web collection. The second is a task-oriented customer-support setup. We show that our method performs well on both use-cases.

2021

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Summary Grounded Conversation Generation
Chulaka Gunasekara | Guy Feigenblat | Benjamin Sznajder | Sachindra Joshi | David Konopnicki
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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TWEETSUMM - A Dialog Summarization Dataset for Customer Service
Guy Feigenblat | Chulaka Gunasekara | Benjamin Sznajder | Sachindra Joshi | David Konopnicki | Ranit Aharonov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

In a typical customer service chat scenario, customers contact a support center to ask for help or raise complaints, and human agents try to solve the issues. In most cases, at the end of the conversation, agents are asked to write a short summary emphasizing the problem and the proposed solution, usually for the benefit of other agents that may have to deal with the same customer or issue. The goal of the present article is advancing the automation of this task. We introduce the first large scale, high quality, customer care dialog summarization dataset with close to 6500 human annotated summaries. The data is based on real-world customer support dialogs and includes both extractive and abstractive summaries. We also introduce a new unsupervised, extractive summarization method specific to dialogs.

2020

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing
Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran | Anita de Waard | Guy Feigenblat | Dayne Freitag | Tirthankar Ghosal | Eduard Hovy | Petr Knoth | David Konopnicki | Philipp Mayr | Robert M. Patton | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing

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Unsupervised FAQ Retrieval with Question Generation and BERT
Yosi Mass | Boaz Carmeli | Haggai Roitman | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We focus on the task of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) retrieval. A given user query can be matched against the questions and/or the answers in the FAQ. We present a fully unsupervised method that exploits the FAQ pairs to train two BERT models. The two models match user queries to FAQ answers and questions, respectively. We alleviate the missing labeled data of the latter by automatically generating high-quality question paraphrases. We show that our model is on par and even outperforms supervised models on existing datasets.

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Conversational Document Prediction to Assist Customer Care Agents
Jatin Ganhotra | Haggai Roitman | Doron Cohen | Nathaniel Mills | Chulaka Gunasekara | Yosi Mass | Sachindra Joshi | Luis Lastras | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

A frequent pattern in customer care conversations is the agents responding with appropriate webpage URLs that address users’ needs. We study the task of predicting the documents that customer care agents can use to facilitate users’ needs. We also introduce a new public dataset which supports the aforementioned problem. Using this dataset and two others, we investigate state-of-the art deep learning (DL) and information retrieval (IR) models for the task. Additionally, we analyze the practicality of such systems in terms of inference time complexity. Our show that an hybrid IR+DL approach provides the best of both worlds.

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Agent Assist through Conversation Analysis
Kshitij Fadnis | Nathaniel Mills | Jatin Ganhotra | Haggai Roitman | Gaurav Pandey | Doron Cohen | Yosi Mass | Shai Erera | Chulaka Gunasekara | Danish Contractor | Siva Patel | Q. Vera Liao | Sachindra Joshi | Luis Lastras | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Customer support agents play a crucial role as an interface between an organization and its end-users. We propose CAIRAA: Conversational Approach to Information Retrieval for Agent Assistance, to reduce the cognitive workload of support agents who engage with users through conversation systems. CAIRAA monitors an evolving conversation and recommends both responses and URLs of documents the agent can use in replies to their client. We combine traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches with more recent Deep Learning (DL) models to ensure high accuracy and efficient run-time performance in the deployed system. Here, we describe the CAIRAA system and demonstrate its effectiveness in a pilot study via a short video.

2019

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Bot2Vec: Learning Representations of Chatbots
Jonathan Herzig | Tommy Sandbank | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)

Chatbots (i.e., bots) are becoming widely used in multiple domains, along with supporting bot programming platforms. These platforms are equipped with novel testing tools aimed at improving the quality of individual chatbots. Doing so requires an understanding of what sort of bots are being built (captured by their underlying conversation graphs) and how well they perform (derived through analysis of conversation logs). In this paper, we propose a new model, Bot2Vec, that embeds bots to a compact representation based on their structure and usage logs. Then, we utilize Bot2Vec representations to improve the quality of two bot analysis tasks. Using conversation data and graphs of over than 90 bots, we show that Bot2Vec representations improve detection performance by more than 16% for both tasks.

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TalkSumm: A Dataset and Scalable Annotation Method for Scientific Paper Summarization Based on Conference Talks
Guy Lev | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | Jonathan Herzig | Achiya Jerbi | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Currently, no large-scale training data is available for the task of scientific paper summarization. In this paper, we propose a novel method that automatically generates summaries for scientific papers, by utilizing videos of talks at scientific conferences. We hypothesize that such talks constitute a coherent and concise description of the papers’ content, and can form the basis for good summaries. We collected 1716 papers and their corresponding videos, and created a dataset of paper summaries. A model trained on this dataset achieves similar performance as models trained on a dataset of summaries created manually. In addition, we validated the quality of our summaries by human experts.

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A Summarization System for Scientific Documents
Shai Erera | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | Guy Feigenblat | Ora Peled Nakash | Odellia Boni | Haggai Roitman | Doron Cohen | Bar Weiner | Yosi Mass | Or Rivlin | Guy Lev | Achiya Jerbi | Jonathan Herzig | Yufang Hou | Charles Jochim | Martin Gleize | Francesca Bonin | Francesca Bonin | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations

We present a novel system providing summaries for Computer Science publications. Through a qualitative user study, we identified the most valuable scenarios for discovery, exploration and understanding of scientific documents. Based on these findings, we built a system that retrieves and summarizes scientific documents for a given information need, either in form of a free-text query or by choosing categorized values such as scientific tasks, datasets and more. Our system ingested 270,000 papers, and its summarization module aims to generate concise yet detailed summaries. We validated our approach with human experts.

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An Editorial Network for Enhanced Document Summarization
Edward Moroshko | Guy Feigenblat | Haggai Roitman | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization

We suggest a new idea of Editorial Network – a mixed extractive-abstractive summarization approach, which is applied as a post-processing step over a given sequence of extracted sentences. We further suggest an effective way for training the “editor” based on a novel soft-labeling approach. Using the CNN/DailyMail dataset we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art extractive-only or abstractive-only baselines.

2018

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Learning Concept Abstractness Using Weak Supervision
Ella Rabinovich | Benjamin Sznajder | Artem Spector | Ilya Shnayderman | Ranit Aharonov | David Konopnicki | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We introduce a weakly supervised approach for inferring the property of abstractness of words and expressions in the complete absence of labeled data. Exploiting only minimal linguistic clues and the contextual usage of a concept as manifested in textual data, we train sufficiently powerful classifiers, obtaining high correlation with human labels. The results imply the applicability of this approach to additional properties of concepts, additional languages, and resource-scarce scenarios.

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Detecting Egregious Conversations between Customers and Virtual Agents
Tommy Sandbank | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | Jonathan Herzig | David Konopnicki | John Richards | David Piorkowski
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Virtual agents are becoming a prominent channel of interaction in customer service. Not all customer interactions are smooth, however, and some can become almost comically bad. In such instances, a human agent might need to step in and salvage the conversation. Detecting bad conversations is important since disappointing customer service may threaten customer loyalty and impact revenue. In this paper, we outline an approach to detecting such egregious conversations, using behavioral cues from the user, patterns in agent responses, and user-agent interaction. Using logs of two commercial systems, we show that using these features improves the detection F1-score by around 20% over using textual features alone. In addition, we show that those features are common across two quite different domains and, arguably, universal.

2017

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Neural Response Generation for Customer Service based on Personality Traits
Jonathan Herzig | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | Tommy Sandbank | David Konopnicki
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

We present a neural response generation model that generates responses conditioned on a target personality. The model learns high level features based on the target personality, and uses them to update its hidden state. Our model achieves performance improvements in both perplexity and BLEU scores over a baseline sequence-to-sequence model, and is validated by human judges.

2016

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Classifying Emotions in Customer Support Dialogues in Social Media
Jonathan Herzig | Guy Feigenblat | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | David Konopnicki | Anat Rafaeli | Daniel Altman | David Spivak
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2014

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Claims on demand – an initial demonstration of a system for automatic detection and polarity identification of context dependent claims in massive corpora
Noam Slonim | Ehud Aharoni | Carlos Alzate | Roy Bar-Haim | Yonatan Bilu | Lena Dankin | Iris Eiron | Daniel Hershcovich | Shay Hummel | Mitesh Khapra | Tamar Lavee | Ran Levy | Paul Matchen | Anatoly Polnarov | Vikas Raykar | Ruty Rinott | Amrita Saha | Naama Zwerdling | David Konopnicki | Dan Gutfreund
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations