Reinforcement learning for user intent prediction in customer service bots

A customer service bot is now a necessary component of an e-commerce platform. As a core module of the customer service bot, user intent prediction can help predict user questions before they ask. A typical solution is to find top candidate questions that a user will be interested in. Such solution ignores the inter-relationship between questions and often aims to maximize the immediate reward such as clicks, which may not be ideal in practice. Hence, we propose to view the problem as a sequential decision making process to better capture the long-term effects of each recommendation in the list. Intuitively, we formulate the problem as a Markov decision process and consider using reinforcement learning for the problem. With this approach, questions presented to users are both relevant and diverse. Experiments on offline real-world dataset and online system demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.