Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications (IVTTA'98) Torino, Italy September 29-30, 1998

A Study on Natural Language Call Routing

Chin-Hui Lee, R. Carpenter, W. Chou, J. Chu-Carroll, W. Reichl, A. Saad, Q. Zhou

Dialogue Systems Research Department, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

Automated call routing is the process of associating a user's request with the desired destination. Although some of the call routing functions can often be accomplished though the use of a touch-tone menu in an interactive voice response system, the interaction between the user and such a system is typically very limited. It is therefore desirable to have a call routing system that takes natural language spoken inputs from the user and asks for additional information to complete the user's request as a human agent would. In this paper we present a recent study on natural language call routing and discuss the capabilities and limitations of current technologies.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Lee, Chin-Hui / Carpenter, R. / Chou, W. / Chu-Carroll, J. / Reichl, W. / Saad, A. / Zhou, Q. (1998): "A study on natural language call routing", In IVTTA'98, 37-42.