Bringing the State-of-the-Art to Customers: A Neural Agent Assistant Framework for Customer Service Support

7 Feb 2023 · Stephen Obadinma, Faiza Khan Khattak, Shirley Wang, Tania Sidhom, Elaine Lau, Sean Robertson, Jingcheng Niu, Winnie Au, Alif Munim, Karthik Raja K. Bhaskar, Bencheng Wei, Iris Ren, Waqar Muhammad, Erin Li, Bukola Ishola, Michael Wang, Griffin Tanner, Yu-Jia Shiah, Sean X. Zhang, Kwesi P. Apponsah, Kanishk Patel, Jaswinder Narain, Deval Pandya, Xiaodan Zhu, Frank Rudzicz, Elham Dolatabadi ·

Building Agent Assistants that can help improve customer service support requires inputs from industry users and their customers, as well as knowledge about state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. We combine expertise from academia and industry to bridge the gap and build task/domain-specific Neural Agent Assistants (NAA) with three high-level components for: (1) Intent Identification, (2) Context Retrieval, and (3) Response Generation. In this paper, we outline the pipeline of the NAA's core system and also present three case studies in which three industry partners successfully adapt the framework to find solutions to their unique challenges. Our findings suggest that a collaborative process is instrumental in spurring the development of emerging NLP models for Conversational AI tasks in industry. The full reference implementation code and results are available at \url{https://github.com/VectorInstitute/NAA}

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