Incorporating Politeness across Languages in Customer Care Responses: Towards building a Multi-lingual Empathetic Dialogue Agent

Mauajama Firdaus, Asif Ekbal, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Customer satisfaction is an essential aspect of customer care systems. It is imperative for such systems to be polite while handling customer requests/demands. In this paper, we present a large multi-lingual conversational dataset for English and Hindi. We choose data from Twitter having both generic and courteous responses between customer care agents and aggrieved users. We also propose strong baselines that can induce courteous behaviour in generic customer care response in a multi-lingual scenario. We build a deep learning framework that can simultaneously handle different languages and incorporate polite behaviour in the customer care agent’s responses. Our system is competent in generating responses in different languages (here, English and Hindi) depending on the customer’s preference and also is able to converse with humans in an empathetic manner to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. Experimental results show that our proposed models can converse in both the languages and the information shared between the languages helps in improving the performance of the overall system. Qualitative and quantitative analysis shows that the proposed method can converse in an empathetic manner by incorporating courteousness in the responses and hence increasing customer satisfaction.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.514
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4172–4182
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.514
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mauajama Firdaus, Asif Ekbal, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2020. Incorporating Politeness across Languages in Customer Care Responses: Towards building a Multi-lingual Empathetic Dialogue Agent. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4172–4182, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Incorporating Politeness across Languages in Customer Care Responses: Towards building a Multi-lingual Empathetic Dialogue Agent (Firdaus et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.514.pdf