ISO-Standard Domain-Independent Dialogue Act Tagging for Conversational Agents

Stefano Mezza, Alessandra Cervone, Evgeny Stepanov, Giuliano Tortoreto, Giuseppe Riccardi


Abstract
Dialogue Act (DA) tagging is crucial for spoken language understanding systems, as it provides a general representation of speakers’ intents, not bound to a particular dialogue system. Unfortunately, publicly available data sets with DA annotation are all based on different annotation schemes and thus incompatible with each other. Moreover, their schemes often do not cover all aspects necessary for open-domain human-machine interaction. In this paper, we propose a methodology to map several publicly available corpora to a subset of the ISO standard, in order to create a large task-independent training corpus for DA classification. We show the feasibility of using this corpus to train a domain-independent DA tagger testing it on out-of-domain conversational data, and argue the importance of training on multiple corpora to achieve robustness across different DA categories.
Anthology ID:
C18-1300
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3539–3551
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1300
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stefano Mezza, Alessandra Cervone, Evgeny Stepanov, Giuliano Tortoreto, and Giuseppe Riccardi. 2018. ISO-Standard Domain-Independent Dialogue Act Tagging for Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3539–3551, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ISO-Standard Domain-Independent Dialogue Act Tagging for Conversational Agents (Mezza et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/C18-1300.pdf
Code
 ColingPaper2018/DialogueAct-Tagger