Samsa: a speech analysis, mining and summary application for outbound telephone calls

The authors applied speech recognition and text mining technologies to a set of 522 recorded outbound marketing calls and analyzed the results. Since speaker-independent speech recognition technology results in a significantly lower recognition rate than that found when the recognizer is trained for a particular speaker, we applied a number of post processing algorithms to the output of the recognizer to render it suitable for the Textract text mining system. We indexed the call transcripts using a search engine and used Textract and associated Java technologies to place the relevant terms for each document in a relational database. Following a search query, we generated a thumbnail display of the results of each call with the salient terms highlighted. We illustrate these results and discuss their utility. We describe a distinct document genre based on the notetaking concept of document content, and propose a significant new method for measuring speech recognition accuracy.