Identification of class specific discourse patterns

In this paper we address the problem of extracting important (and unimportant) discourse patterns from call center conversations. Call centers provide dialog based calling-in support for customers to address their queries, requests and complaints. A Call center is the direct interface between an organization and its customers and it is important to capture the voice-of-customer by gathering insights into the customer experience. We have observed that the calls received at a call center contain segments within them that follow specific patterns that are typical of the issue being addressed in the call. We present methods to extract such patterns from the calls. We show that by aggregating over a few hundred calls, specific discourse patterns begin to emerge for each class of calls. Further, we show that such discourse patterns are useful for classifying calls and for identifying parts of the calls that provide insights into customer behaviour.