Method and apparatus for detection of sentiment in automated transcriptions

An apparatus for automatically detecting sentiments in an audio signal of an interaction held in a call center, comprising:

• an interaction receiving component arranged to receive an audio signal representing the interaction;
• an extraction component for obtaining text spoken within the interaction;
• a context unit segmentation component arranged to segment the audio signal into context units according to acoustic information acquired from the audio signal to identify units of speech bound by non-speech segments;
• wherein each context unit includes one or more words;
• a sentiment candidate identification component for identifying a sentiment candidate from the context units using a phonetic based search;
• a feature extraction component arranged to extract linguistic features from the text of the sentiment candidates and acoustic features from a segment of the audio signal associated with the sentiment candidates;
• and
• a classification component arranged to apply a model to the linguistic features and acoustic features to determine whether the audio signal contains sentiment, or sentiment polarity and intensity of the sentiment within the audio signal.