Supplying data augmentation to conversational question answering (CQA) can effectively improve model performance. However, there is less improvement from single-turn datasets in CQA due to the distribution gap between single-turn and multi-turn datasets. On the other hand, while numerous single-turn datasets are available, we have not utilized them effectively. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method to convert single-turn datasets to multi-turn datasets. The proposed method consists of three parts, namely, a QA pair Generator, a QA pair Reassembler, and a question Rewriter. Given a sample consisting of context and single-turn QA pairs, the Generator obtains candidate QA pairs and a knowledge graph based on the context. The Reassembler utilizes the knowledge graph to get sequential QA pairs, and the Rewriter rewrites questions from a conversational perspective to obtain a multi-turn dataset S2M. Our experiments show that our method can synthesize effective training resources for CQA. Notably, S2M ranks 1st place on the QuAC leaderboard (https://quac.ai/) at the time of submission (Aug 24th, 2022).

The online performance of customer service bots is often less than satisfactory because of the gap between limited training data and real-world user questions. As a straightforward way to improve online performance, model iteration and re-deployment are time consuming and labor-intensive, and therefore difficult to sustain. To fix badcases and improve online performance of chatbots in a timely and continuous manner, we propose a data-centric solution consisting of three main modules: badcase detection, bad case correction, and answer extraction. By making full use of online model signals, implicit user feedback and artificial customer service log, the proposed solution can fix online badcases automatically. Our solution has been deployed and bringing consistently positive impacts for hundreds of customer service bots used by Alipay app.