Robust Complaint Processing in Portuguese

Abstract

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has witnessed huge improvements in the last years. However, most achievements are evaluated on benchmarked curated corpora, with little attention devoted to user-generated content and less-resourced languages. Despite the fact that recent approaches target the development of multi-lingual tools and models, they still underperform in languages such as Portuguese, for which linguistic resources do not abound. This paper exposes a set of challenges encountered when dealing with a real-world complex NLP problem, based on user-generated complaint data in Portuguese. This case study meets the needs of a country-wide governmental institution responsible for food safety and economic surveillance, and its responsibilities in handling a high number of citizen complaints. Beyond looking at the problem from an exclusively academic point of view, we adopt application-level concerns when analyzing the progress obtained through different techniques, including the need to obtain explainable decision support. We discuss modeling choices and provide useful insights for researchers working on similar problems or data.