Human-in-the-Loop Conversation Agent for Customer Service

This paper describes a prototype system for partial automation of customer service operations of a mobile telecommunications operator with a human-in-the loop conversational agent. The agent consists of an intent detection system for identifying the types of customer requests that it can handle appropriately, a slot filling information extraction system that integrates with the customer service database for a rule-based treatment of the common scenarios, and a template-based language generation system that builds response candidates that can be approved or amended by customer service operators. The main focus of this paper is on the system architecture and machine learning system structure design, and the observations of a limited pilot study performed to evaluate the proposed system on customer messages in Latvian. We also discuss the business requirements and practical application limitations and their influence on the design of the natural language processing components.