Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

More and more, human has to talk with computers. It follows an economic reality. Sometimes, the communication is defective. This type of lack of communication is frustrating for both the client andthe industry. It also jeopardizes the good relation with the client. Bell Canada would like to study this problem in a context of call center. The objective of this project is to enhance Human-Computer (H-C) dialog systems for call centers. Enhancements will be explored in two ways. First, we propose to classify H-C dialogs as problematic or successful. This task will serve to track unsatisfied customer by predicting their satisfaction given the H-C dialog. Second, we propose to automatically monitor a customer dialog in order to track problematic situations where negative emotions are detected during the dialog. This task will allow on-the-fly the redirection of an unsatisfied customer to an agent for assistance. The focus of our work will be in combining multi-knowledge sources including prosodic, linguistic and paralinguistic features and in using learning techniques. This research project will be studied in the setting of telephone call centers in collaboration with our industrial partner Bell Canada.