Dialogue Management for an Automated Multilingual Call Center

Abstract

The AMITIES project (Automated Multilingual Interaction with Information and Services) has been established under joint funding from the European Commission's 5th Framework Program and the U.S. DARPA to develop the next generation of empirically-induced human-computer interaction capabilities in spoken language. One of the central goals of this project is to create a dialogue management system capable of engaging the user in human-like conversation within a specific domain. The domain we selected is telephone-based customer service where the system has access to an appropriate information database to support callers information needs. Our objective is to automate at least some of the more mundane human functions in customer service call centers, but do so in a manner that is maximally responsive to the customer. This practically eliminates all prompt or menu based voice response systems used at commercial call centers today. Exploiting the corpus of hundreds (and soon to be thousands) of annotated dialogues, recorded at European financial call centers, we have developed a call triaging prototype for financial services domain. This demonstrator system handles the initial portion of a customer call: identifying the customer (based on a sample customer database) and determining the reason the customer is calling (based on a subset of transactions handled at the call center). Our approach to dialogue act semantics allows for mixed system/customer initiative and spontaneous conversation to occur. We are currently extending this prototype beyond its triage role to negotiate and execute the transactions requested by the customers, ranging from simple address changes to more complex account payment transactions. The aim of AMITIES project is to build a large-scale, empirical system using data-driven design, derived from actual and purposeful (i.e., not acted or contrived) human-to-human dialogues. The prototype described here has not been empirically validated yet.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA460629

Entities

People

  • Hilda Hardy
  • Min Wu
  • Tomek Strzalkowski

Organizations

  • State University of New York at Albany

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Automated Speech Recognition
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Customer Services
  • Databases
  • Dialogue Systems
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Identification
  • Information Operations
  • Language
  • Models
  • New York
  • Prototypes
  • Relational Databases
  • User Interface

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Government Contracting/Procurement.
  • Systems Analysis and Design