Fraud detection in telephone conversations for financial services using linguistic features

TL;DR

This paper introduces a transparent fraud detection method for financial telephone conversations that leverages linguistic features and simple classifiers to identify deception effectively.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach using linguistic and sentiment analysis with explainable classifiers for fraud detection in transcribed calls.

Findings

Effective detection of deception using linguistic features

Simple classifiers achieve robust results

Approach is transparent and explainable

Abstract

Detecting the elements of deception in a conversation is one of the most challenging problems for the AI community. It becomes even more difficult to design a transparent system, which is fully explainable and satisfies the need for financial and legal services to be deployed. This paper presents an approach for fraud detection in transcribed telephone conversations using linguistic features. The proposed approach exploits the syntactic and semantic information of the transcription to extract both the linguistic markers and the sentiment of the customer's response. We demonstrate the results on real-world financial services data using simple, robust and explainable classifiers such as Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbours, and Support Vector Machines.