Ling-Yen Liao


2021

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A Practical 2-step Approach to Assist Enterprise Question-Answering Live Chat
Ling-Yen Liao | Tarec Fares
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Live chat in customer service platforms is critical for serving clients online. For multi-turn question-answering live chat, typical Question Answering systems are single-turn and focus on factoid questions; alternatively, modeling as goal-oriented dialogue limits us to narrower domains. Motivated by these challenges, we develop a new approach based on a framework from a different discipline: Community Question Answering. Specifically, we opt to divide and conquer the task into two sub-tasks: (1) Question-Question Similarity, where we gain more than 9% absolute improvement in F1 over baseline; and (2) Answer Utterances Extraction, where we achieve a high F1 score of 87% for this new sub-task. Further, our user engagement metrics reveal how the enterprise support representatives benefit from the 2-step approach we deployed to production.
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