Effective user intent mining with unsupervised word representation models and topic modelling

Understanding the intent behind chat between customers and customer service agents has become a crucial problem nowadays due to an exponential increase in the use of the Internet by people from different cultures and educational backgrounds. More importantly, the explosion of e-commerce has led to a significant increase in text conversation between customers and agents. In this paper, we propose an approach to data mining the conversation intents behind the textual data. Using the customer service data set, we train unsupervised text representation models, and then develop an intent mapping model which would rank the predefined intents base on cosine similarity between sentences and intents. Topic-modeling techniques are used to define intents and domain experts are also involved to interpret topic modelling results. With this approach, we can get a good understanding of the user intentions behind the unlabelled customer service textual data.