Automatic topic identification for two-level call routing

This paper presents an approach to routing telephone calls automatically, based upon their speech content. The data consist of a set of calls collected from a customer-service center with a two-level menu, which allows jumping past the second level, and we view the routing of these calls as a topic identification problem. Our topic identifier employs a multinomial model for keyword occurrences. We describe the call routing task in detail, discuss the multinomial model, and present experiments which investigate several issues that arise from using the model for this task