Project MAIA : Multilingual AI Agent Assistant (2020)

Abstract: This paper presents the Multilingual Artificial Intelligence Agent Assistant (MAIA), a project led by Unbabel with the collaboration of CMU, INESC-ID and IT Lisbon. MAIA will employ cutting-edge machine learning and natural language processing technologies to build multilingual AI agent assistants, eliminating language barriers. MAIA’s translation layer will empower human agents to provide customer support in real-time, in any language, with human quality.

## introduction online conversational support -chat -is the fastest growing customer service channel, being the preferred way for millennials to obtain customer service. today, supporting international customers in this channel is mostly done by using human agents that speak different languages -a scarce and costly resource. the tremendous progress of language technologies (machine translation and dialogue systems) in the last years makes them an appealing tool for multilingual customer service. however, current systems are still too brittle and impractical: first, they require too much data and computing power, failing for domains or languages where labeled data is scarce; second, they do not capture contextual information (e.g. current mt systems work on a sentence-by-sentence basis, ignoring the conversation context); third, fully automatic systems lack human empathy and fail on unexpected scenarios, leading to low customer satc 2020 the authors. this article is licensed under a creative commons 3.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, cc-by-nd.