Technology Category
Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & RetrievalNatural Language Processing: Information ExtractionSearch and Optimization: Learning to Search
Towards Proactive Information Probing: Customer Service Chatbots Harvesting Value from Conversation
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the limitation of traditional customer service chatbots, which passively respond to user queries and struggle to proactively acquire high-value business information efficiently. The paper introduces, for the first time, the task of “proactive information probing” and presents PROCHATIP, a novel framework that strategically controls probing timing to collect predefined target information while minimizing user disruption and dialogue turns. Central to PROCHATIP is a dedicated dialogue policy module that enables the agent to autonomously determine when and how to initiate probing actions. Experimental results demonstrate that PROCHATIP significantly outperforms existing baselines in both information acquisition efficiency and service quality, highlighting its potential as a low-cost, scalable engine for proactive business intelligence.
Technology Category
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Customer service chatbots are increasingly expected to serve not merely as reactive support tools for users, but as strategic interfaces for harvesting high-value information and business intelligence. In response, we make three main contributions. 1) We introduce and define a novel task of Proactive Information Probing, which optimizes when to probe users for pre-specified target information while minimizing conversation turns and user friction. 2) We propose PROCHATIP, a proactive chatbot framework featuring a specialized conversation strategy module trained to master the delicate timing of probes. 3) Experiments demonstrate that PROCHATIP significantly outperforms baselines, exhibiting superior capability in both information probing and service quality. We believe that our work effectively redefines the commercial utility of chatbots, positioning them as scalable, cost-effective engines for proactive business intelligence. Our code is available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/PROCHATIP.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Proactive Information Probing
Customer Service Chatbots
Business Intelligence
Conversation Strategy
User Friction
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Proactive Information Probing
Chatbot Framework
Conversation Strategy
Business Intelligence
User Friction Minimization
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