Patent ID: 11922928
Assignee: BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G

Claim 10:
11. A method for providing pre-processing of an utterance prior to feeding utterance-related data to a sequential neural network classifier for conversation sentiment scoring, the utterance being expressed, by a user, to an interactive response system during an interaction between the user and the interactive response system, the method comprising:
a conversation manager receiving a request including the utterance, previous utterance data and a sequence of labels, each label being associated with a previous utterance expressed by a user during the interaction;
a natural language processor processing the utterance to output an utterance intent;
a signal extractor processing the utterance, the utterance intent and the previous utterance data to generate one or more utterance signals;
an utterance sentiment classifier:
storing a hierarchy of rules, each rule in the hierarchy being associated with one or more rule signals and a label;
in response to receiving the one or more utterance signals from the signal extractor, iterating through the hierarchy of rules in sequential order to identify a rule in the hierarchy for which the one or more utterance signals are a superset of the rule's one or more rule signals, the iterating ending when the rule is identified;

the sequential neural network classifier:
receiving a data input including the sequence of labels and a label associated with the rule identified by the utterance sentiment classifier, the data input not including the utterance;
processing the data input using a trained algorithm; and
outputting a sentiment score;

the conversation manager:
identifying a response to the utterance based on the utterance intent, the label and the sentiment score; and
transmitting the response to the interactive response system; and

the interactive response system receiving the response and outputting the response to the user;
wherein:
the pre-processing of the utterance by the natural language processor, the signal extractor and the utterance sentiment classifier reduces the data input to the label and the sequence of labels, thereby increasing a speed at which the sequential neural network classifier returns the sentiment score and decreasing resources consumed by the sequential neural network classifier when processing the data input.