Understanding Meanings in Multilingual Customer Feedback

Abstract

Understanding and being able to react to customer feedback is the most fundamental task in providing good customer service. However, there are two major obstacles for international companies to automatically detect the meaning of customer feedback in a global multilingual environment. Firstly, there is no widely acknowledged categorisation (classes) of meaning for customer feedback. Secondly, the applicability of one meaning categorisation, if it exists, to customer feedback in multiple languages is questionable. In this paper, we extracted representative real world samples of customer feedback from Microsoft Office customers in multiple languages, English, Spanish and Japanese,and concluded a five-class categorisation(comment, request, bug, complaint and meaningless) for meaning classification that could be used across languages in the realm of customer feedback analysis.