Dialogue Act Tagging with Transformation-Based Learning

For the task of recognizing dialogue acts, we are applying the Transformation-Based Learning (TBL) machine learning algorithm. To circumvent a sparse data problem, we extract values of well-motivated features of utterances, such as speaker direction, punctuation marks, and a new feature, called dialogue act cues, which we find to be more effective than cue phrases and word n-grams in practice. We present strategies for constructing a set of dialogue act cues automatically by minimizing the entropy of the distribution of dialogue acts in a training corpus, filtering out irrelevant dialogue act cues, and clustering semantically-related words. In addition, to address limitations of TBL, we introduce a Monte Carlo strategy for training efficiently and a committee method for computing confidence measures. These ideas are combined in our working implementation, which labels held-out data as accurately as any other reported system for the dialogue act tagging task.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Ken Samuel, Sandra Carberry, K. Vijay-Shanker
• Keywords: ACL 1998, ACL 2007, Dialogue Act, Dialogue Act Cues, Irrelevant Dialogue Act