Interactive voice response system with a real time conversation scoring module

An interactive voice response system for interpreting sentiment of a conversation in real-time, the interactive voice response system comprising:

• a receiver operable to receive:
• a plurality of sentiment signals;
• and
• a first portion of a conversation, said conversation being defined as Conv:={(U1, R1), (U2, R2), . . . , (Un, Rn)}, where Cony is a conversation, U is an utterance and R is a system response, Ui is the ith utterance, and Ri is the ith system response;
• an utterance sentiment category determination module, said utterance sentiment category determination module comprising:
• an assignment module, said assignment module operable to assign a subset of the plurality of sentiment signals to each utterance;
• a multi-class classifier operation module, said multi-class classifier operation module operable to execute a multi-class classifier operation on each assigned subset of the plurality of sentiment signals;
• and
• a sub-determination module that determines an utterance sentiment category for each utterance based on the execution of the multi-class classifier operation;
• a sequential module operable to determine a conversation sentiment category based on the determined utterance sentiment categories and an order of the utterance sentiment categories;
• and
• an output module operable to output the conversation sentiment category.