Classifying Emotions in Customer Support Dialogues in Social Media

Providing customer support through social media channels is gaining increasing popularity. In such a context, automatic detection and analysis of the emotions expressed by customers is important, as is identification of the emotional techniques (e.g., apology, empathy, etc.) in the responses of customer service agents. Result of such an analysis can help assess the quality of such a service, help and inform agents about desirable responses, and help develop automated service agents for social media interactions. In this paper, we show that, in addition to text based turn features, dialogue features can significantly improve detection of emotions in social media customer service dialogues and help predict emotional techniques used by customer service agents.