Imagine standing curbside, waiting for your Uber ride to arrive. On your app, you see that the car is barely moving. You send them a message to find out what’s going on.
Unbeknownst to you, your driver-partner is stuck in …
Huaixiu Zheng
Huaixiu Zheng is a senior data scientist at Uber, working on projects in the domains of deep learning, reinforcement learning, natural language processing and conversational AI systems.
Engineering Blog Articles
Scaling Uber’s Customer Support Ticket Assistant (COTA) System with Deep Learning
Earlier this year, we introduced Uber’s Customer Obsession Ticket Assistant (COTA) system, a tool that leverages machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to recommend support ticket responses (Contact Type and Reply) to customer support agents, with Contact …
COTA: Improving Uber Customer Care with NLP & Machine Learning
To facilitate the best end-to-end experience possible for users, Uber is committed to making customer support easier and more accessible. Working toward this goal, Uber’s Customer Obsession team leverages five different customer-agent communication channels powered by an in-house platform that …
Research Papers
Flexibly-Structured Model for Task-Oriented Dialogues
L. Shu, P. Molino, M. Namazifar, H. Xu, B. Liu, H. Zheng, G. Tur
This paper proposes a novel end-to-end architecture for task-oriented dialogue systems. It is based on a simple and practical yet very effective sequence-to-sequence approach, where language understanding and state tracking tasks are modeled jointly with a structured copy-augmented sequential decoder and a multi-label decoder for each slot. The policy engine and language generation tasks are modeled jointly following that. [...] [PDF]
2019
This paper proposes a novel end-to-end architecture for task-oriented dialogue systems. It is based on a simple and practical yet very effective sequence-to-sequence approach, where language understanding and state tracking tasks are modeled jointly with a structured copy-augmented sequential decoder and a multi-label decoder for each slot. The policy engine and language generation tasks are modeled jointly following that. [...] [PDF]
2019
COTA: Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Customer Support through Ranking and Deep Networks
P. Molino, H. Zheng, Y.-C. Wang
For a company looking to provide delightful user experiences, it is of paramount importance to take care of any customer issues. This paper proposes COTA, a system to improve speed and reliability of customer support for end users through automated ticket classification and answers selection for support representatives. [...] [PDF]
ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Science (KDD), 2018
For a company looking to provide delightful user experiences, it is of paramount importance to take care of any customer issues. This paper proposes COTA, a system to improve speed and reliability of customer support for end users through automated ticket classification and answers selection for support representatives. [...] [PDF]
ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Science (KDD), 2018
Incorporating the Structure of the Belief State in End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
L. Shu, P. Molino, M. Namazifar, B. Liu, H. Xu, H. Zheng, and G. Tur
End-to-end trainable networks try to overcome error propagation, lack of generalization and overall brittleness of traditional modularized task-oriented dialogue system architectures. Most proposed models expand on the sequence-to-sequence architecture. Some of them don’t track belief state, which makes it difficult to interact with ever-changing knowledge bases, while the ones that explicitly track the belief state do it with classifiers. The use of classifiers suffers from the out-of-vocabulary words problem, making these models hard to use in real-world applications with ever-changing knowledge bases. We propose Structured Belief Copy Network (SBCN), a novel end-to-end trainable architecture that allows for interaction with external symbolic knowledge bases and solves the out-of-vocabulary problem at the same time. [...] [PDF]
Conversational Intelligence Challenge at Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (ConvAI @ NeurIPS), 2018
End-to-end trainable networks try to overcome error propagation, lack of generalization and overall brittleness of traditional modularized task-oriented dialogue system architectures. Most proposed models expand on the sequence-to-sequence architecture. Some of them don’t track belief state, which makes it difficult to interact with ever-changing knowledge bases, while the ones that explicitly track the belief state do it with classifiers. The use of classifiers suffers from the out-of-vocabulary words problem, making these models hard to use in real-world applications with ever-changing knowledge bases. We propose Structured Belief Copy Network (SBCN), a novel end-to-end trainable architecture that allows for interaction with external symbolic knowledge bases and solves the out-of-vocabulary problem at the same time. [...] [PDF]
Conversational Intelligence Challenge at Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (ConvAI @ NeurIPS), 2018