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<Paper uid="P98-1040">
  <Title>Dialogue Management in Vector-Based Call Routing</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The call routing task involves directing a user's call to the appropriate destination within a call center or providing some simple information, such as loan rates. In current systems, the user's goals are typically gleaned via a touch-tone system employing a rigid hierarchical menu. The primary disadvantages of navigating menus for users are the time it takes to listen to all the options and the difficulty of matching their goals to the options; these problems are compounded by the necessity of descending a nested hierarchy of choices to zero in on a particular activity. Even simple requests such as &amp;quot;I'd like my savings account balance&amp;quot; may require users to navigate as many as four or five nested menus with four or five options each. We have developed an alternative to touch-tone menus that allows users to interact with a call router in natural spoken English dialogues just as they would with a human operator.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Human operators respond to a caller request by 1) routing the call to an appropriate destination, or 2) querying the caller for further information to determine where to route the call. Our automatic call router has these two options as well as a third option of sending the call to a human operator. The rest of this paper provides both a description and an evaluation of an automatic call router driven by vector-based information retrieval techniques.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> After introducing our fundamental routing technique, we focus on the disambiguation query generation module.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Our disambiguation module is based on the same statistical training as routing, and dynamically generates queries tailored to the caller's request and the destinations with which it is consistent. The main advantages of our system are that 1) it is domain independent, 2) it is trained fully automatically to both route and disambiguate requests, and 3) its performance is sufficient for use in the field, substantially improving on that of previous systems.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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