BERTaú: Itaú BERT for digital customer service
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In the last few years, three major topics received increased interest: deep learning, NLP and conversational agents. Bringing these three topics together to create an amazing digital customer experience and indeed deploy in production and solve real-world problems is something innovative and disruptive. We introduce a new Portuguese financial domain language representation model called BERTaú. BERTaú is an uncased BERT-base trained from scratch with data from the Itaú virtual assistant chatbot solution. Our novel contribution is that BERTaú pretrained language model requires less data, reached state-of-the-art performance in three NLP tasks, and generates a smaller and lighter model that makes the deployment feasible. We developed three tasks to validate our model: information retrieval with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) from Itaú bank, sentiment analysis from our virtual assistant data, and a NER solution. All proposed tasks are real-world solutions in production on our environment and the usage of a specialist model proved to be effective when compared to Google BERT multilingual and the DPRQuestionEncoder from Facebook, available at Hugging Face. The BERTaú improves the performance in 22 in NER F1 score and can also represent the same sequence in up to 66 tokens when compared to "shelf models".
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