Sentiment Classification in Customer Service Dialogue with Topic-Aware Multi-Task Learning

Sentiment analysis in dialogues plays a critical role in dialogue data analysis. However, previous studies on sentiment classification in dialogues largely ignore topic information, which is important for capturing overall information in some types of dialogues. In this study, we focus on the sentiment classification task in an important type of dialogue, namely customer service dialogue, and propose a novel approach which captures overall information to enhance the classification performance. Specifically, we propose a topic-aware multi-task learning (TML) approach which learns topic-enriched utterance representations in customer service dialogue by capturing various kinds of topic information. In the experiment, we propose a large-scale and high-quality annotated corpus for the sentiment classification task in customer service dialogue and empirical studies on the proposed corpus show that our approach significantly outperforms several strong baselines.