Mining customer care dialogs for "Daily News"

As large-scale deployments of spoken dialog systems in call centers become more common, a wealth of information is gathered about the call center business as well as the operation of these systems from their daily logs. This paper describes the "VoiceTone Daily News" data mining tool for analyzing this information and presenting it in a readily comprehensible and customizable form that is suitable for use by anyone from system designers to call center businesses. Relevant business and dialog features are extracted from the speech logs of caller-system interactions and tracked by trend analysis algorithms. We describe novel techniques for generating alerts on multiple data streams while avoiding redundant "knock-on" alerts. Some initial experiments with automated measures of dialog success are described as possible additional features to track. Features that move outside their expected bounds on a given day generate headlines as part of a website generated completely automatically from each day's logs. A "drill-down" facility allows headlines to be investigated all the way to viewing logs of individual interactions behind the headline and listening to the audio for individual turns.