Short Utterance Dialogue Act Classification Using a Transformer Ensemble

An influx of digital assistant adoption and reliance is demonstrating the significance of reliable and robust dialogue act classification techniques. In the literature, there is an over-representation of purely lexical-based dialogue act classification methods. A weakness of this approach is the lack of context when classifying short utterances. We improve upon a purely lexical approach by incorporating a state-of-the-art acoustic model in a lexical-acoustic transformer ensemble, with improved results, when classifying dialogue acts in the MRDA corpus. Additionally, we further investigate the performance on an utterance word-count basis, showing classification accuracy increases with utterance word count. Furthermore, the performance of the lexical model increases with utterance word length and the acoustic model performance decreases with utterance word count, showing the models complement each other for different utterance lengths

Fraud detection in telephone conversations for financial services using linguistic features

Detecting the elements of deception in a conversation is one of the most challenging problems for the AI community. It becomes even more difficult to design a transparent system, which is fully explainable and satisfies the need for financial and legal services to be deployed. This paper presents an approach for fraud detection in transcribed telephone conversations using linguistic features. The proposed approach exploits the syntactic and semantic information of the transcription to extract both the linguistic markers and the sentiment of the customer’s response. We demonstrate the results on real-world financial services data using simple, robust and explainable classifiers such as Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbours, and Support Vector Machines

Deception Detection in Conversations using the Proximity of Linguistic Markers

Detecting the elements of deception in a conversation takes years of study and experience, and it is a skill set primarily used in law-enforcement agencies. In ever-growing business opportunities, organisations employ teleoperators to provide support and services to their large customer base, which is a potential platform for fraud. With technological advancements, it is desirable to have an automated system that spots the deceptive elements in the conversation, and provides this information to the teleoperators to better support them in their interactions. We propose the Decision Engine to detect deceptive conversation based on the proximity of linguistic markers present, which produces a deception score for a conversation and highlights the potential deceptive elements of the conversation. In collaboration with behavioural experts, we have selected ten linguistic markers that potentially indicate deception. We have built a variety of models to detect the trigger terms for selected linguistic markers without ambiguity, using either regular expressions or the BERT model. The BERT model has been trained on a conversational dataset that we collated and was labelled by our behavioural experts. The proposed Decision Engine employs the BERT model and regular expressions to detect the linguistic markers and compute the proximity features to further estimate the deception score. We evaluated the proposed approach on the Columbia-SRI-Colorado (CSC) dataset and a real-world Financial Services dataset. In addition to accuracy, we have also employed the True Positive Rate metric, with a high enough threshold to avoid any false-positive cases, which we indicate as TPRF0. The Decision Engine achieves 69% accuracy and 46% TPRF0 for the CSC dataset and 72% accuracy and 60% TPRF0 for the Financial Services dataset. In contrast, a baseline model, which uses nonproximity features achieves 67% accuracy and 32% TPRF0 for the CSC dataset and 67% accuracy and 10% TPRF0 for the Financial Services dataset. Furthermore, using the Decision Engine, the impact of the proximity of markers on the deception score has been analysed by our behavioural experts to provide insight into linguistic behaviour in relation to deception

Resolving Ambiguity in Hedge Detection by Automatic Generation of Linguistic Rules

An understanding of natural language is key in order to robustly extract the linguistic features indicative of deceptive speech. Hedging is a key indicator of deceptive speech as it can indicate a speaker's lack of commitment in a conversation. Hedging is characterised by words and phrases that display a sense of vagueness or that lack precision, such as suppose, about. The identification of hedging terms in speech is a challenging task, due to the ambiguity of natural language, as a phrase can have multiple meanings. This paper proposes to automate the process of generating rules for hedge detection in transcripts produced by an automatic speech recognition system using explainable decision tree models trained on syntactic features. We have extracted syntactic features through dependency parsing to capture the grammatical relationship between hedging terms and their surrounding words based on meaning and context. We tested the effectiveness of our model on a dataset of conversational speech, for 75 different hedging terms, and achieved an F1 score of 0.88. The result of our automated process is comparable to existing solutions for hedge detection