After the training data is collected and the class models are built,
we run the system receiving the audio input from participants of the
conversation. The audio input is processed by the speech recognition
module which outputs a list of the word candidates as a discounted
conversation model. The matching algorithm
sequentially updates the conversation model in such a way that the
words spoken most recently have the largest score, which is slowly
decaying. For a conversation model ,
we compute the updates
at each step after receiving a word wordk:
where
is the decay parameter,
equals
1 if the the wordk is the same word as xi (i.e. i = k).
Having computed the conversation model for the time step t, its class-conditional probability is computed as follows:
This probability is converted to the posterior probability of the topic c using the Bayes rule. Here, the prior probabilities P(c) of each class are estimated by cross-validation:
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Figure 1 shows class probabilities for the ongoing conversation. After these probabilities are computed for each class the most likely topic c is selected and the corresponding feedback is given to the users as described below.