question suggestion
Enhancing Discoverability in Enterprise Conversational Systems with Proactive Question Suggestions
Shen, Xiaobin, Lee, Daniel, Ranjan, Sumit, Harsha, Sai Sree, Sevak, Pawan, Li, Yunyao
Enterprise conversational AI systems are becoming increasingly popular to assist users in completing daily tasks such as those in marketing and customer management. However, new users often struggle to ask effective questions, especially in emerging systems with unfamiliar or evolving capabilities. This paper proposes a framework to enhance question suggestions in conversational enterprise AI systems by generating proactive, context-aware questions that try to address immediate user needs while improving feature discoverability. Our approach combines periodic user intent analysis at the population level with chat session-based question generation. We evaluate the framework using real-world data from the AI Assistant for Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), demonstrating the improved usefulness and system discoverability of the AI Assistant.
Question Suggestion for Conversational Shopping Assistants Using Product Metadata
Vedula, Nikhita, Rokhlenko, Oleg, Malmasi, Shervin
Digital assistants have become ubiquitous in e-commerce applications, following the recent advancements in Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, customers are often unsure or unaware of how to effectively converse with these assistants to meet their shopping needs. In this work, we emphasize the importance of providing customers a fast, easy to use, and natural way to interact with conversational shopping assistants. We propose a framework that employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate contextual, useful, answerable, fluent and diverse questions about products, via in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Recommending these questions to customers as helpful suggestions or hints to both start and continue a conversation can result in a smoother and faster shopping experience with reduced conversation overhead and friction. We perform extensive offline evaluations, and discuss in detail about potential customer impact, and the type, length and latency of our generated product questions if incorporated into a real-world shopping assistant.
Learning to Suggest Questions in Online Forums
Zhou, Tom Chao (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) | Lin, Chin-Yew (Microsoft Research Asia) | King, Irwin (AT and T Labs Research) | Lyu, Michael R. (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) | Song, Young-In (Microsoft Research Asia) | Cao, Yunbo (Microsoft Research Asia)
Online forums contain interactive and semantically related discussions on various questions. Extracted question-answer archive is invaluable knowledge, which can be used to improve Question Answering services. In this paper, we address the problem of Question Suggestion, which targets at suggesting questions that are semantically related to a queried question. Existing bag-of-words approaches suffer from the shortcoming that they could not bridge the lexical chasm between semantically related questions. Therefore, we present a new framework to suggest questions, and propose the Topicenhanced Translation-based Language Model (TopicTRLM) which fuses both the lexical and latent semantic knowledge. Extensive experiments have been conducted with a large real world data set. Experimental results indicate our approach is very effective and outperforms other popular methods in several metrics.