Patent Document ID: 20020107712
Application ID: 09733946
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A computer implemented method for categorizing incoming electronic communications using a supervised machine learning component, where the method factors an organization's business domain into the technology domain to enable an acceptable automated response and routing system, said method comprising the steps of: (a) analyzing the business domain; (b) determining an approach to machine learning in the form of a program or an algorithm that will be used to induce a categorizer using supervised learning, the categorizer being generated from training data comprising a set of examples of the communications of a kind to be classified; (c) collecting existing data of representative examples of electronic communications and inventories of personnel skills, business processes, workflows, and business missions; (d) analyzing the collected data, thereby gaining an appreciation of the complexity, vagueness, and uniqueness to be expected in the communications to be categorized, as well as the relative numbers of various kinds of communications, and also thereby determining a technical structure of the communications that is likely to be relevant to categorization, as well as, factoring the inventories of personnel skills, business processes, workflows, and business missions collected, providing a basis for obtaining a complete understanding of what must be done with each electronic communication, and by whom. (e) defining a categorization scheme; (f) labeling examples of electronic communications with categories from the categorization scheme for use both as training data to be used in the supervised learning step and as test data; (g) converting the labeled data into a form suitable for subsequent processing, both for purposes of machine learning and technical validation; (h) performing machine based supervised learning technology to induce a categorizer for the categorization scheme; and (i) validating the categorization scheme with respect to technical performance and business requirements.