International Business Machines Corporation
Relevant document retrieval to assist agent in real time customer care conversations

Abstract:

An enhanced information retrieval system takes a customer utterance and constructs a contextually-enriched content-based query allowing the system to retrieve the most relevant documents to assist an agent in a real-time conversation with the customer. Phrases in the utterance are classified as informational or non-informational using a machine learning system trained with phrases from prior conversations of multiple users. Content phrases are extracted from the informational phrases using keyword extraction (ranking noun phrases), intent/action extraction (semantic role labeling), and topic label extraction (clustering of historical logs). Emotional content is identified using a sequence tagging model and removed. Contextual information from prior conversations with this user is combined with the updated content phrases to create the contextually-enhanced content-based query, which can then be submitted to the information retrieval system.