Abstract
Human agents in technical customer support provide users with instructional answers to solve a task. Developing a technical support question answering (QA) system is challenging due to the broad variety of user intents. Moreover, user questions are noisy (for example, spelling mistakes), redundant and have various natural language expresses, which are challenges for QA system to match user queries to corresponding standard QA pair. In this work, we combine question intent categories classification and semantic matching model to filter and select correct answers from a back-end knowledge base. Using a real world user chatlog dataset with 60 intent categories, we observe that while supervised models, perform well on the individual classification tasks. For semantic matching, we add muti-info (answer and product information) into standard question and emphasize context information of user query (captured by GRU) into our model. Experiment results indicate that neural multi-perspective sentence similarity networks outperform baseline models. The precision of semantic matching model is 85%.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chung, J., Gulcehre, C., Cho, K.H.: Empirical evaluation of gated recurrent neural networks on sequence modeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.3555 (2014)
He, H., Gimpel, K., Lin, J.: Multi-perspective sentence similarity modeling with convolutional neural networks. In: 20th International Proceedings on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1576–1586. ACL, Stroudsburg (2015)
Lowe, R.T., Pow, N., Serban, I.V.: Training end-to-end dialogue systems with the Ubuntu dialogue corpus. Dialogue Discourse 8(1), 31–65 (2017)
Feng, M., Xiang, B., Glass, M.R.: Applying deep learning to answer selection: a study and an open task. In: 3rd International Proceedings on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), pp. 813–820. IEEE, Piscataway (2015)
Li, X., Li, L., Gao, J.: Recurrent reinforcement learning: a hybrid approach. Computer Science (2015)
Bilotti, M.W., Ogilvie, P., Callan, J.: Structured retrieval for question answering. In: 30th International Proceedings on SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 351–358. ACM, New York (2007)
Shen, D., Lapata, M.: Using semantic roles to improve question answering. In: 12th International Proceedings on Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, pp. 12–21. ACL, Stroudsburg (2007)
Wang, M., Smith, N.A., Mitamura, T.: What is the Jeopardy model? A quasi-synchronous grammar for QA. In: 12th International Proceedings on Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, pp. 22–32. ACL, Stroudsburg (2007)
Yih, W., Chang, M.W., Meek, C.: Question answering using enhanced lexical semantic models. In: 51st International Proceedings on Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1744–1753. ACL, Stroudsburg (2013)
Hu, B., Lu, Z., Li, H.: Convolutional neural network architectures for matching natural language sentences. In: 23rd International Proceedings on Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 2042–2050. Springer, Berlin (2014)
Liu, Z., Li, M., Bai, T., Yan, R., Zhang, Y.: A dual attentive neural network framework with community metadata for answer selection. In: Huang, X., Jiang, J., Zhao, D., Feng, Y., Hong, Y. (eds.) NLPCC 2017. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 10619, pp. 88–100. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73618-1_8
Tomar, G.S., Duque, T.: Neural paraphrase identification of questions with noisy pretraining. In: 22th International Proceedings on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 142–147. ACL, Stroudsburg (2017)
Wu, Y., Wu, W., Xing, C.: Sequential matching network: a new architecture for multi-turn response selection in retrieval-based Chatbots. In: 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 496–505. ACL, Stroudsburg (2017)
Pennington, J., Socher, R., Manning, C.: Glove: global vectors for word representation. In: 19th International Proceedings on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1532–1543. ACL, Stroudsburg (2014)
Hochreiter, S., Schmidhuber, J.: Long short-term memory. Neural Comput. 9(8), 1735–1780 (1997)
Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K.: Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. In: 9th International Proceedings on Advances in Neural Information Processing System, pp. 3111–3119. MIT Press, Massachusetts (2013)
Kusner, M., Sun, Y., Kolkin, N.: From word embeddings to document distances. In: 32nd International Proceedings on International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 957–966. ACM, New York (2015)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Li, Y. et al. (2018). Question Answering for Technical Customer Support. In: Zhang, M., Ng, V., Zhao, D., Li, S., Zan, H. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99495-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99495-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99494-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99495-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)