Automatic analysis of call-center conversations

ABSTRACT

We describe a system for automating call-center analysis and monitoring. Our system integrates transcription of incoming calls with analysis of their content; for the analysis, we introduce a novel method of estimating the domain-specific importance of conversation fragments, based on divergence of corpus statistics. Combining this method with Information Retrieval approaches, we provide knowledge-mining tools both for the call-center agents and for administrators of the center.

REFERENCES

• 1: James Allan, Perspectives on Information Retrieval and Speech, Information Retrieval Techniques for Speech Applications [this book is based on the workshop "Information Retrieval Techniques for Speech Applications", held as part of the 24th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Infor, p.1-10, September 01, 2001
• 2: Stephan Busemann , Sven Schmeier , Roman G. Arens, Message classification in the call center, Proceedings of the sixth conference on Applied natural language processing, p.158-165, April 29-May 04, 2000, Seattle, Washington [doi>10.3115/974147.974169]
• 3: D. Carmel, E. Amitay, M. Herscovici, Y. S. Maarek, Y. Petruschka, and A. Soffer. Juru at trec 10 -- experiments with index pruning. In TREC, 2001.
• 4: David Carmel , Menachem Shtalhaim , Aya Soffer, eResponder: Electronic Question Responder, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, p.150-161, September 06-08, 2000
• 5: Jennifer Chu-Carroll , Bob Carpenter, Vector-based natural language call routing, Computational Linguistics, v.25 n.3, p.361-388, Septmeber 1999
• 6: David Ferrucci , Adam Lally, UIMA: an architectural approach to unstructured information processing in the corporate research environment, Natural Language Engineering, v.10 n.3-4, p.327-348, September 2004 [doi>10.1017/S1351324904003523]
• 7: A. Kilgarriff. Comparing corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 6(1):1--37, 2001.
• 8: B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu, G. Saon, G. Zweig, S. Axelrod, V. Goel, K. Visweswariah, and M. Picheny. Towards domain-inependent conversational speech recognition. In Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland, September 2003.
• 9: Jon Kleinberg, Bursty and hierarchical structure in streams, Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, July 23-26, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/775047.775061]
• 10: Leila Kosseim , Stéphane Beauregard , Guy Lapalme, Using information extraction and natural language generation to answer e-mail, Data & Knowledge Engineering, v.38 n.1, p.85-100, 07/01/2001 [doi>10.1016/S0169-023X(01)00018-0]
• 11: G. Leech, P. Rayson, and A. Wilson. Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus. Longman, 2001.
• 12: G. Riccardi , A. Gorin , A. Ljolje , M. Riley, A Spoken Language System for Automated Call Routing, Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP '97)-Volume 2, p.1143, April 21-24, 1997
• 13: B. Schiffman. Building a Resource for Evaluating the Importance of Sentences. In LREC02, Las Palmas, Spain, May-June 2002.
• 14: IBM WebSphere Voice Server. http : //www.ibm.com/software/pervasive/voice server.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Languages, Management

Keywords:
automatic speech recognition, call centers