Many companies make use of customer service chats to help the customer and try to solve their problem. However, customer service data is confidential and as such, cannot easily be shared in the research community. This also implies that these data are rarely labeled, making it difficult to take advantage of it with machine learning methods. In this paper we present the first work on a customer’s problem status prediction and identification of problematic conversations. Given very small subsets of labeled textual conversations and unlabeled ones, we propose a semi-supervised framework dedicated to customer service data leveraging speaker role information to adapt the model to the domain and the task using a two-step process. Our framework, Task-Adaptive Fine-tuning, goes from predicting customer satisfaction to identifying the status of the customer’s problem, with the latter being the main objective of the multi-task setting. It outperforms recent inductive semi-supervised approaches on this novel task while only considering a relatively low number of parameters to train on during the final target task. We believe it can not only serve models dedicated to customer service but also to any other application making use of confidential conversational data where labeled sets are rare. Source code is available at https://github.com/gguibon/taft

Users generate content constantly, leading to new data requiring annotation. Among this data, textual conversations are created every day and come with some specificities: they are mostly private through instant messaging applications, requiring the conversational context to be labeled. These specificities led to several annotation tools dedicated to conversation, and mostly dedicated to dialogue tasks, requiring complex annotation schemata, not always customizable and not taking into account conversation-level labels. In this paper, we present EZCAT, an easy-to-use interface to annotate conversations in a two-level configurable schema, leveraging message-level labels and conversation-level labels. Our interface is characterized by the voluntary absence of a server and accounts management, enhancing its availability to anyone, and the control over data, which is crucial to confidential conversations. We also present our first usage of EZCAT along with our annotation schema we used to annotate confidential customer service conversations. EZCAT is freely available at https://gguibon.github.io/ezcat.

Several recent studies on dyadic humanhuman interactions have been done on conversations without specific business objectives.However, many companies might benefit from studies dedicated to more precise environments such as after sales services or customer satisfaction surveys.In this work, we place ourselves in the scope of a live chat customer service in which we want to detect emotions and their evolution in the conversation flow.This context leads to multiple challenges that range from exploiting restricted, small and mostly unlabeled datasets to finding and adapting methods for such context.We tackle these challenges by using Few-Shot Learning while making the hypothesis it can serve conversational emotion classification for different languages and sparse labels.We contribute by proposing a variation of Prototypical Networks for sequence labeling in conversation that we name ProtoSeq.We test this method on two datasets with different languages: daily conversations in English and customer service chat conversations in French.When applied to emotion classification in conversations, our method proved to be competitive even when compared to other ones.The code for Proto-Seq is available at https://github.com/ gguibon/ProtoSeq.