HHC. Then, Section 4 provides the achieved results
of IQ modelling for HHC on different emotion sets
and different approaches of IQ annotating. The
obtained results are discussed in Section 5, which is
followed in Section 6 by conclusions and concise
description of future work.
2 RELATED WORK
The idea of applying IQ for HHC is based on the IQ
paradigm, introduced in (Schmitt et al., 2011) for
assessing the performance of an SDS during an
ongoing interaction. The IQ metric allows to
estimate, how the system is performing at any point
during the interaction. The IQ metric is a 5-point
scale: excellent, good, fair, poor, and bad. If the
quality drops below a certain threshold, the dialogue
strategies shall be changed in order to increase the
quality again. The metric is based on features which
are derived from the three dialogue system modules:
Automatic Speech Recognition, Natural Language
Understanding, and Dialogue Management.
Moreover, these interaction parameters are designed
on the three levels: the exchange level, comprising
information about the current system-user-exchange,
the dialogue level, consisting of information about
the complete dialogue up to the current exchange,
and the window level, containing information about
the n last exchanges. The complete list of features
can be found in (Schmitt et al., 2012). While the IQ
metric has been proven to be beneficial in human-
machine interaction scenarios, the approach may
also help to assess the quality of human-human
communication. This is for example of particular
interest in call centres, where calls with the rather
low quality of interaction have to be found for
training and evaluation purposes.
There are different research works, which allow to
assess different aspects of human speech in dialogues.
One of such a work is dedicated to the Customer
Orientation Behaviours (COBs), which were
suggested by the authors in (Rafaeli et al., 2008).
The COBs include the following categories:
anticipating customer requests, offering explanations
/ justifications, educating customers, providing
emotional support, and offering personalized
information. Within their research the authors have
ascertained the positive relationship between the
COB categories and the service quality, evaluated by
customers. However, this approach allows to assess
only an agent in a dialogue, but, nevertheless, the
COBs are also an important aspect of interaction and
can help to evaluate the quality of interaction
between an agent and a customer in general.
The authors in (Pallotta et al., 2011) described
their approach to Call Center Analytics. It is based
on Interaction Mining - a research field, which
works with an extraction of useful information from
conversations. The authors described the
cooperativeness score as a measure, which was
obtained from the argumentative labels, such as:
accept explanation, suggest, propose, provide
opinion, provide explanation or justification, request
explanation or justification, question, raise issue,
provide negative opinion, disagree, reject
explanation or justification. Using the history of the
calls the cooperativeness score can help to determine
agents with constantly high cooperativeness score
(positive cooperativeness) and customers with low
cooperativeness score. Thus, it can help to improve
the call centre performance by connecting more
skilled agents with customers with uncooperative
attitudes. The cooperativeness score gives a
characteristic of agent’s or customer’s speech or
their behaviour and may be used for the interaction
quality evaluation.
Another important indicator for an estimation of
the conversation quality, which is widely used in call
centres, is customer satisfaction. A lot of works are
dedicated to it.
In (Park et al., 2009) the authors suggested the
approach, which allows to evaluate customer
satisfaction automatically by analysing call transcripts
consisting of various features, indicating linguistic,
prosodic and behavioural aspects of speakers. Their
experiments shown, that customer satisfaction may be
evaluated both at the end and in the middle of calls.
The paper (Llimona et al., 2015), dedicating to
customer satisfaction in a call centre, provides the
research of an effect of gender and call duration on
customer satisfaction in call centre big data. The
authors found out the significant correlation between
customer satisfaction (self-reported by a customer at
the end of the call) and gender homophile between
the customer and the employee.
The research works in the field of customer
satisfaction may be applied for modelling IQ,
despite of some differences between IQ and
customer satisfaction. These differences between
two metrics and their resemblance are described in
(Schmitt and Ultes, 2015).
Moreover, there has been a lot of research
dedicated to emotion recognition, verbal intelligent
detection, agreement/disagreement detection and
others. All these works are useful for different
purposes and can be utilized for the evaluation of the
conversation quality.