David Piorkowski


2018

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Detecting Egregious Conversations between Customers and Virtual Agents
Tommy Sandbank | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | Jonathan Herzig | David Konopnicki | John Richards | David Piorkowski
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Virtual agents are becoming a prominent channel of interaction in customer service. Not all customer interactions are smooth, however, and some can become almost comically bad. In such instances, a human agent might need to step in and salvage the conversation. Detecting bad conversations is important since disappointing customer service may threaten customer loyalty and impact revenue. In this paper, we outline an approach to detecting such egregious conversations, using behavioral cues from the user, patterns in agent responses, and user-agent interaction. Using logs of two commercial systems, we show that using these features improves the detection F1-score by around 20% over using textual features alone. In addition, we show that those features are common across two quite different domains and, arguably, universal.