A major part of business operations is interacting with customers. Traditionally this was done by human agents, face to face or over telephone calls within customer support centers. There is now a move towards automation in this field using chatbots and virtual assistants, as well as an increased focus on analyzing recorded conversations to gather insights. Determining the different services that a human agent provides and estimating the incurred call handling costs per service are key to prioritizing service automation. We propose a new technique, ELDA (Embedding based LDA), based on a combination of LDA topic modeling and sentence embeddings, that can take a dataset of customer-agent dialogs and extract key utterances instead of key words. The aim is to provide more meaningful and contextual topic descriptions required for interpreting and labeling the topics, reducing the need for manually reviewing dialog transcripts.

We present a novel technique to infer ranked dialog flows from human-to-human conversations that can be used as an initial conversation design or to analyze the complexities of the conversations in a call center. This technique aims to identify, for a given service, the most common sequences of questions and responses from the human agent. Multiple dialog flows for different ranges of top paths can be produced so they can be reviewed in rank order and be refined in successive iterations until additional flows have the desired level of detail. The system ingests historical conversations and efficiently condenses them into a weighted deterministic finite-state automaton, which is then used to export dialog flow designs that can be readily used by conversational agents. A proof-of-concept experiment was conducted with the MultiWoz data set, a sample output is presented and future directions are outlined.