Data drift is the change in model input data that is one of the key factors leading to machine learning models performance degradation over time. Monitoring drift helps detecting these issues and preventing their harmful consequences. Meaningful drift interpretation is a fundamental step towards effective re-training of the model. In this study we propose an end-to-end framework for reliable model-agnostic change-point detection and interpretation in large task-oriented dialog systems, proven effective in multiple customer deployments. We evaluate our approach and demonstrate its benefits with a novel variant of intent classification training dataset, simulating customer requests to a dialog system. We make the data publicly available.

The rapidly growing market demand for automatic dialogue agents capable of goal-oriented behavior has caused many tech-industry leaders to invest considerable efforts into task-oriented dialog systems. The success of these systems is highly dependent on the accuracy of their intent identification – the process of deducing the goal or meaning of the user’s request and mapping it to one of the known intents for further processing. Gaining insights into unrecognized utterances – user requests the systems fails to attribute to a known intent – is therefore a key process in continuous improvement of goal-oriented dialog systems. We present an end-to-end pipeline for processing unrecognized user utterances, deployed in a real-world, commercial task-oriented dialog system, including a specifically-tailored clustering algorithm, a novel approach to cluster representative extraction, and cluster naming. We evaluated the proposed components, demonstrating their benefits in the analysis of unrecognized user requests.