Discourse Chunking: A Tool in Dialogue Act Tagging

Discourse chunking is a simple way to segment dialogues according to how dialogue participants raise topics and negotiate them. This paper explains a method for arranging dialogues into chunks, and also shows how discourse chunking can be used to improve performance for a dialogue act tagger that uses a case-based reasoning approach. 1 Dialogue act tagging A dialogue act (hereafter DA) is an encapsulation of the speakerÕs intentions in dialogueÑwhat the speaker is trying to accomplish by saying something. In DA tagging (similar to part-of-speech tagging), utterances in a dialogue are tagged with the most appropriate speech act from a tagset. DA tagging has application in NLP work, including speech recognition and language understanding. The Verbmobil-2 corpus was used for this study, with its accompanying tagset, shown in

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ACL
• Authors: T. Daniel Midgley
• Keywords: ACL 2003, ACL 2007, Dialogue, Dialogue Act, Discourse Chunking