In a typical call center, only up to 8% of callersleave a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveyresponse at the end of the call, and these tend tobe customers with strongly positive or negativeexperiences. To manage this data sparsity andresponse bias, we outline a predictive CSATdeep learning algorithm that infers CSAT onthe 1-5 scale on inbound calls to the call centerwith minimal latency. The key metric to maximize is the precision for CSAT = 1 (lowestCSAT). We maximize this metric in two ways.First, reframing the problemas a binary class, rather than five-class problem during model fine-tuning, and then mapping binary outcomes back to five classes usingtemperature-scaled model probabilities. Second, using soft labels to represent the classes. Theresult is a production model able to support keycustomer workflows with high accuracy overmillions of calls a month.

Machine translation (MT) draws from several different disciplines, making it a complex subject to teach. There are excellent pedagogical texts, but problems in MT and current algorithms for solving them are best learned by doing. As a centerpiece of our MT course, we devised a series of open-ended challenges for students in which the goal was to improve performance on carefully constrained instances of four key MT tasks: alignment, decoding, evaluation, and reranking. Students brought a diverse set of techniques to the problems, including some novel solutions which performed remarkably well. A surprising and exciting outcome was that student solutions or their combinations fared competitively on some tasks, demonstrating that even newcomers to the field can help improve the state-of-the-art on hard NLP problems while simultaneously learning a great deal. The problems, baseline code, and results are freely available.