Eun-hee Rhim

Personalized Adaptive Learning using Neural Networks

Adaptive learning is the core technology behind intelligent tutoring systems, which are responsible for estimating student knowledge and providing personalized instruction to students based on their skill level. In this paper, we present a new adaptive learning system architecture, which uses Artificial Neural Network to construct the Learner Model, which automatically models relationship between different concepts in the curriculum and beats Knowledge Tracing in predicting student performance. We also propose a novel method for selecting items of optimal difficulty, personalized to students skill level and learning rate, which decreases their learning time by 26.5% as compared to standard pre-defined curriculum sequence item selection policy.

Mining the Minds of Customers from Online Chat Logs

This study investigates factors that may determine satisfaction in customer service operations. We utilized more than 170,000 online chat sessions between customers and agents to identify characteristics of chat sessions that incurred dissatisfying experience. Quantitative data analysis suggests that sentiments or moods conveyed in online conversation are the most predictive factor of perceived satisfaction. Conversely, other session related meta data (such as that length, time of day, and response time) has a weaker correlation with user satisfaction. Knowing in advance what can predict satisfaction allows customer service staffs to identify potential weaknesses and improve the quality of service for better customer experience.

Domain Question Answering System

Question Answering (QA) services can provide exact answers to user questions written in natural language form. This research focuses on how to build a QA system for a specific domain area. Online and offline QA system architecture of targeted domain such as domain detection, question analysis, reasoning, information retrieval, filtering, answer extraction, re-ranking, and answer generation, as well as data preparation are presented herein. Test results with an official Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) set showed 68% accuracy of the top 1 and 77% accuracy of the top 5. The contribution of each part such as question analysis system, document search engine, knowledge graph engine and re-ranking module for achieving the final answer are also presented.

Positivity Bias in Customer Satisfaction Ratings.

Customer ratings are valuable sources to understand their satisfaction and are critical for designing better customer experiences and recommendations. The majority of customers, however, do not respond to rating surveys, which makes the result less representative. To understand overall satisfaction, this paper aims to investigate how likely customers without responses had satisfactory experiences compared to those respondents. To infer customer satisfaction of such unlabeled sessions, we propose models using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that learn continuous representations of unstructured text conversation. By analyzing online chat logs of over 170,000 sessions from Samsungs customer service department, we make a novel finding that while labeled sessions contributed by a small fraction of customers received overwhelmingly positive reviews, the majority of unlabeled sessions would have received lower ratings by customers. The data analytics presented in this paper not only have practical implications for helping detect dissatisfied customers on live chat services but also make theoretical contributions on discovering the level of biases in online rating platforms.