Chunwei Lu


2019

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Detecting Customer Complaint Escalation with Recurrent Neural Networks and Manually-Engineered Features
Wei Yang | Luchen Tan | Chunwei Lu | Anqi Cui | Han Li | Xi Chen | Kun Xiong | Muzi Wang | Ming Li | Jian Pei | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers)

Consumers dissatisfied with the normal dispute resolution process provided by an e-commerce company’s customer service agents have the option of escalating their complaints by filing grievances with a government authority. This paper tackles the challenge of monitoring ongoing text chat dialogues to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent, providing triage and prioritization for a separate pool of specialized agents specially trained to handle more complex situations. We describe a hybrid model that tackles this challenge by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. Experiments show that both components are complementary and contribute to overall recall, outperforming competitive baselines. A trial online deployment of our model demonstrates its business value in improving customer service.