German Question Answering in CRM Systems

Abstract

We present a Question Answering (QA) approach within the context of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems in German which we applied to several use cases. However, we aim to generalize the suggested approach, so it can be applied to other domains. In this course, the subjects of tabular QA, extractive QA and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) are examined. Moreover, we reveal our findings regarding fine-tuning transformer models for QA and propose an automatic labelling mechanism that can be integrated into QA systems in order to simplify the creation of training data. We evaluated on various CRM-related data sources. The evaluation of the fine-tuned extractive QA pipeline resulted in an F1-score of 76.93 %. A qualitative analysis by domain experts showed that the tabular QA pipeline with translation and column name mapping leads to an accuracy of 40 %.