A Million Tweets Are Worth a Few Points: Tuning Transformers for Customer Service Tasks

Amir Hadifar, Sofie Labat, Veronique Hoste, Chris Develder, Thomas Demeester


Abstract
In online domain-specific customer service applications, many companies struggle to deploy advanced NLP models successfully, due to the limited availability of and noise in their datasets. While prior research demonstrated the potential of migrating large open-domain pretrained models for domain-specific tasks, the appropriate (pre)training strategies have not yet been rigorously evaluated in such social media customer service settings, especially under multilingual conditions. We address this gap by collecting a multilingual social media corpus containing customer service conversations (865k tweets), comparing various pipelines of pretraining and finetuning approaches, applying them on 5 different end tasks. We show that pretraining a generic multilingual transformer model on our in-domain dataset, before finetuning on specific end tasks, consistently boosts performance, especially in non-English settings.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
220–225
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amir Hadifar, Sofie Labat, Veronique Hoste, Chris Develder, and Thomas Demeester. 2021. A Million Tweets Are Worth a Few Points: Tuning Transformers for Customer Service Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 220–225, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Million Tweets Are Worth a Few Points: Tuning Transformers for Customer Service Tasks (Hadifar et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.naacl-main.21.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.naacl-main.21.mp4
Code
 hadifar/customerservicetasks