Web Chat Conversations from Contact Centers: a Descriptive Study

Géraldine Damnati, Aleksandra Guerraz, Delphine Charlet


Abstract
In this article we propose a descriptive study of a chat conversations corpus from an assistance contact center. Conversations are described from several view points, including interaction analysis, language deviation analysis and typographic expressivity marks analysis. We provide in particular a detailed analysis of language deviations that are encountered in our corpus of 230 conversations, corresponding to 6879 messages and 76839 words. These deviations may be challenging for further syntactic and semantic parsing. Analysis is performed with a distinction between Customer messages and Agent messages. On the overall only 4% of the observed words are misspelled but 26% of the messages contain at least one erroneous word (rising to 40% when focused on Customer messages). Transcriptions of telephone conversations from an assistance call center are also studied, allowing comparisons between these two interaction modes to be drawn. The study reveals significant differences in terms of conversation flow, with an increased efficiency for chat conversations in spite of longer temporal span.
Anthology ID:
L16-1319
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2017–2021
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1319
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Géraldine Damnati, Aleksandra Guerraz, and Delphine Charlet. 2016. Web Chat Conversations from Contact Centers: a Descriptive Study. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2017–2021, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Web Chat Conversations from Contact Centers: a Descriptive Study (Damnati et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1319.pdf