Using data science and machine learning for improved customer support

In this blog post we’ll explore three tricks that can be used for data science that helped us solve real problems for our customer support group and our customers. Two for natural language processing in a customer support context and one for identifying attack Internet attack traffic.
Through these examples, we hope to demonstrate how invaluable data processing tricks, visualisations and tools can be before putting data into a machine learning algorithm. By refining data prior to processing, we are able to achieve dramatically improved results without needing to change the underlying machine learning strategies which are used.
Know the Limits (Language Classification)
When browsing a social media site, you may find the site prompts you to translate a post even though it is in your language.
We recently came across a similar problem at Cloudflare when we were looking into language classification for chat support messages. Using an off-the-shelf classification algorithm, users with short messages often had their chats classified incorrectly and our analysis found there’s a correlation between the length of a message and the accuracy of the classification (based on the browser Accept-Language header and the languages of the country where the request was submitted):

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