Papers for

call center operations teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Algorithm learns to schedule jobs efficiently without knowing time limits

Learning While Scheduling Jobs under Context-Dependent Service Rates: An Anytime Rate-Optimal Algorithm

Abstract: We study contextual queueing bandits, where a learner schedules jobs while learning unknown service rates modeled by logistic functions of job-server features. Performance is measured by queue length regret, the expected excess queue length at round $t$ relative to an oracle that knows the service rates. Existing decaying-regret guarantees either have a suboptimal decay rate or require a known fixed horizon. They also assume context-wise slack and a strictly positive minimum eigenvalue of the feature covariance. In this paper, we propose WISE (Widest Interval Selection with Elimination), achieving rate-optimal $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(t^{-1/2})$ queue length regret at every sufficiently large time without knowing the horizon. We assume capacity slack, meaning that expected incoming workload under best-server service is below service capacity, and impose no covariance lower bound. Our analysis uses a workload potential measuring the expected service attempts needed by waiting jobs on their best servers. Its drift on nonempty rounds combines a negative term ensured by capacity slack with errors from suboptimal service choices. Then an elliptical potential count bounds how often WISE selects wide confidence intervals, thereby limiting the number of rounds with large service errors. We also sharpen the arrival-rate dependence of an existing lower bound and make its dependence on feature dimension and server count explicit. We prove another lower bound that quantifies the increase in regret as the normalized capacity slack decreases; to our knowledge, this is the first such lower bound for CQB. Simulations show small regret even when context-wise slack fails.

Mon 5 OctMachine Learning
The gist
This paper looks at how to schedule jobs on servers when the speed of each server depends on job features and is initially unknown. The authors propose an algorithm called WISE that learns these speeds over time and schedules jobs to keep queues short, even without knowing in advance how long it will run. Their method improves on previous approaches by achieving the best possible rate of reducing delay and works under more realistic assumptions. The authors also provide mathematical guarantees and show simulations where their algorithm performs well.
Open → 2610.06006v1

Korean speech error correction improves call center transcript accuracy

Leveraging Fine-grained Error Correction in Korean Speech Recognition for Consultation Services

Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology is fundamental to customer service automation and large-scale transcription. However, even advanced ASR models exhibit inevitable errors in complex real-world environments such as call center conversations. When privacy restrictions preclude audio access, error correction must rely on text-based post-editing. Existing text-only approaches face significant challenges in low-resource languages, mainly due to a critical scarcity of annotated corpora and tailored correction methodologies. For Korean, this resource gap is particularly pronounced, as existing resources are predominantly designed for ASR training rather than text-based error correction. To address this, we introduce DasanCallDial, the first large-scale Korean benchmark dataset specifically curated for dialogue-level ASR error correction. Derived from genuine call center interactions, it comprises 1,974 dialogues with 115,460 utterances. Leveraging this resource, we propose Detector-Gated Contextual Span Correction (DCSC), a text-only post-editing framework for error-sparse Korean speech recognition transcripts. DCSC combines an encoder-based detector that first performs token-level error detection, followed by a language model-based corrector trained to rectify fine-grained span-level errors. Additionally, we employ dialogue-level context augmentation to enable the model to leverage discourse history for disambiguation. By employing multi-level granularity, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively overcoming the limitations of general LLMs in low-resource settings.

Wed 9 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Accurate transcripts from speech recognition are hard to get, especially for languages like Korean with few resources. The authors created a large dataset from real call center conversations to help fix errors in these transcripts using just text. They designed a new method that first finds mistakes word by word, then carefully corrects the errors by looking at the surrounding conversation. Their approach works better than general language models, helping make automatic Korean call transcripts more reliable without needing the original audio.
Open → 2609.09889v1