29,432 research outputs found
Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech
We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in
conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question,
Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and
predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as
well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue
model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a
hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating
from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are
modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined
with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the
idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We
develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue
modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification
accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database
of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous
human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling
accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody,
and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of
35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling
changed
When Are Tree Structures Necessary for Deep Learning of Representations?
Recursive neural models, which use syntactic parse trees to recursively
generate representations bottom-up, are a popular architecture. But there have
not been rigorous evaluations showing for exactly which tasks this syntax-based
method is appropriate. In this paper we benchmark {\bf recursive} neural models
against sequential {\bf recurrent} neural models (simple recurrent and LSTM
models), enforcing apples-to-apples comparison as much as possible. We
investigate 4 tasks: (1) sentiment classification at the sentence level and
phrase level; (2) matching questions to answer-phrases; (3) discourse parsing;
(4) semantic relation extraction (e.g., {\em component-whole} between nouns).
Our goal is to understand better when, and why, recursive models can
outperform simpler models. We find that recursive models help mainly on tasks
(like semantic relation extraction) that require associating headwords across a
long distance, particularly on very long sequences. We then introduce a method
for allowing recurrent models to achieve similar performance: breaking long
sentences into clause-like units at punctuation and processing them separately
before combining. Our results thus help understand the limitations of both
classes of models, and suggest directions for improving recurrent models
How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations
We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify
discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data
from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very
uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic
roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of
question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very
much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion
dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two
different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model
outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using
platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word
relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively
to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions.
Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn
discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed,
with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism
enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to
their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil
important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our
text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous
non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play
their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook
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