Hierarchical Incident Ticket Classification with Minimal Supervision

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for incident ticket classification that aims at minimizing the manual labelling effort while achieving good-quality predictions. To accomplish this, we devise a two-stage technique that employs hierarchical clustering using a combination of graph clustering (community finding) and topic modelling as first stage, followed by either another round of hierarchical clustering or an active learning approach as second stage. We evaluate the performance of our method in terms of manual labelling effort, prediction quality and efficiency on three real-world datasets and demonstrate that classical approaches to text classification are not well suited for incident ticket texts.