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Creating an Effective Topic

To be effective, a Topic must be well-defined. Since speakers use many different terms to express the same idea, you should try to include as wide a range of alternative terms as possible. To get ideas for what to include, listen to existing calls about the subject or similar subjects, and consult agents who handle calls.

In many cases, Topics can benefit from fine-tuning after they have been applied to calls and the call auditing process takes place. (For information about call auditing, see the SpeechMiner User Manual and Auditing a Topic below.)

Here are a few suggestions to help you get started when defining a Topic:

1. Business Problem: Before you begin listing terms, define the data you want to collect in 3-4 sentences. Think about the intent that the terms you are collecting should reflect, and be as specific as possible.
2. Terms: List as many common terms as you can that are frequently used to express the intent. Include as many variations of the term as you can.
3. Term length: Longer terms are easier for SpeechMiner to identify than shorter terms, so try to use terms that include at least 4-6 words and at least 20 characters. Terms can contain up to 100 characters. As a rule, the longer the term, the more accurately it will be identified by SpeechMiner. However, fewer events are found for longer terms. Conversely, the shorter the term, the more events will be found, but the accuracy will be lower.
4. Synonyms: Try to think of synonyms for words that appear in the terms, and list variations of the terms by using the synonyms in place of the original terms. For example, if you are looking for conversations in which closing an account is discussed, list all terms with the verbs "cancel" and “close”:
   - "want to cancel my account"
   - "want to close my account"
   - "need to close my account"
   - “need to cancel my account”
5. Short words: Remove short words from the beginnings of terms whenever possible. For example, instead of "I want to reduce the rate," use "want to reduce the rate."
6. Keywords: When you select a keyword in a term, you give it extra weight, so that SpeechMiner specifically looks for that word when screening calls. It is not always necessary to specify a keyword. If no keyword is selected for a term, SMART automatically marks the longest word in the term as the keyword. For example, in the term “I already called to cancel my account,” if you do not select a keyword, SMART automatically selects the word "already" as the keyword.

> However, it is best to choose the keyword for each term if you can, because this ensures that the correct keyword is selected. Thus, in the example above, you should select “cancel” as the keyword. Note that when a keyword is selected for a term, it is automatically applied to the entire Topic. Do not select the same keyword for another Topic.

> In general, only one keyword should be selected per term; if two words always appear together, like credit card', you can select them both as the keyword.

See also

Overview of the Topic-Manager Interface
Defining a New Topic
Modifying a Topic
Auditing a Topic
Managing Secured Topics
Deleting Topics