Shayna Gardiner


2022

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Developing a Production System for Purpose of Call Detection in Business Phone Conversations
Elena Khasanova | Pooja Hiranandani | Shayna Gardiner | Cheng Chen | Simon Corston-Oliver | Xue-Yong Fu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Track

For agents at a contact centre receiving calls, the most important piece of information is the reason for a given call. An agent cannot provide support on a call if they do not know why a customer is calling. In this paper we describe our implementation of a commercial system to detect Purpose of Call statements in English business call transcripts in real time. We present a detailed analysis of types of Purpose of Call statements and language patterns related to them, discuss an approach to collect rich training data by bootstrapping from a set of rules to a neural model, and describe a hybrid model which consists of a transformer-based classifier and a set of rules by leveraging insights from the analysis of call transcripts. The model achieved 88.6 F1 on average in various types of business calls when tested on real life data and has low inference time. We reflect on the challenges and design decisions when developing and deploying the system.

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Entity-level Sentiment Analysis in Contact Center Telephone Conversations
Xue-yong Fu | Cheng Chen | Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar | Shayna Gardiner | Pooja Hiranandani | Shashi Bhushan Tn
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Entity-level sentiment analysis predicts the sentiment about entities mentioned in a given text. It is very useful in a business context to understand user emotions towards certain entities, such as products or companies. In this paper, we demonstrate how we developed an entity-level sentiment analysis system that analyzes English telephone conversation transcripts in contact centers to provide business insight. We present two approaches, one entirely based on the transformer-based DistilBERT model, and another that uses a neural network supplemented with some heuristic rules.

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Punctuation Restoration in Spanish Customer Support Transcripts using Transfer Learning
Xiliang Zhu | Shayna Gardiner | David Rossouw | Tere Roldán | Simon Corston-Oliver
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems typically produce unpunctuated transcripts that have poor readability. In addition, building a punctuation restoration system is challenging for low-resource languages, especially for domain-specific applications. In this paper, we propose a Spanish punctuation restoration system designed for a real-time customer support transcription service. To address the data sparsity of Spanish transcripts in the customer support domain, we introduce two transferlearning-based strategies: 1) domain adaptation using out-of-domain Spanish text data; 2) crosslingual transfer learning leveraging in-domain English transcript data. Our experiment results show that these strategies improve the accuracy of the Spanish punctuation restoration system.