Automatic recognition of the general-purpose communicative functions defined by the ISO 24617-2 standard for dialog act annotation

From the perspective of a dialog system, it is important to identify the intention behind the segments in a dialog, since it provides an important cue regarding the information that is present in the segments and how they should be interpreted. ISO 24617-2, the standard for dialog act annotation, defines a hierarchically organized set of general-purpose communicative functions which correspond to different intentions that are relevant in the context of a dialog. We explore the automatic recognition of these communicative functions in the DialogBank, which is a reference set of dialogs annotated according to this standard. To do so, we propose adaptations of existing approaches to flat dialog act recognition that allow them to deal with the hierarchical classification problem. More specifically, we propose the use of an end-to-end hierarchical network with cascading outputs and maximum a posteriori path estimation to predict the communicative function at each level of the hierarchy, preserve the dependencies between the functions in the path, and decide at which level to stop. Furthermore, since the amount of dialogs in the DialogBank is small, we rely on transfer learning processes to reduce overfitting and improve performance. The results of our experiments show that our approach outperforms both a flat one and hierarchical approaches based on multiple classifiers and that each of its components plays an important role towards the recognition of general-purpose communicative functions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mapping the dialog act annotations of the LEGO corpus into ISO 24617-2 communicative functions

ISO 24617-2, the ISO standard for dialog act annotation, sets the ground for more comparable research in the area. However, the amount of data annotated according to it is still reduced, which impairs the development of approaches for automatic recognition. In this paper, we describe a mapping of the original dialog act labels of the LEGO corpus, which have been neglected, into the communicative functions of the standard. Although this does not lead to a complete annotation according to the standard, the 347 dialogs provide a relevant amount of data that can be used in the development of automatic communicative function recognition approaches, which may lead to a wider adoption of the standard. Using the 17 English dialogs of the DialogBank as gold standard, our preliminary experiments have shown that including the mapped dialogs during the training phase leads to improved performance while recognizing communicative functions in the Task dimension.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Automatic recognition of the general-purpose communicative functions defined by the ISO 24617-2 standard for dialog act annotation (Extended abstract)

From the perspective of a dialog system, the identification of the intention behind the segments in a dialog is important, as it provides cues regarding the information present in the segments and how they should be interpreted. The ISO 24617-2 standard for dialog act annotation defines a hierarchically organized set of general-purpose communicative functions that correspond to different intentions that are relevant in the context of a dialog. In this paper, we explore the automatic recognition of these functions. To do so, we propose to adapt existing approaches to dialog act recognition, so that they can deal with the hierarchical classification problem. More specifically, we propose the use of an end-to-end hierarchical network with cascading outputs and maximum a posteriori path estimation to predict the communicative function at each level of the hierarchy, preserve the dependencies between the functions in the path, and decide at which level to stop. Additionally, we rely on transfer learning processes to address the data scarcity problem. Our experiments on the DialogBank show that this approach outperforms both flat and hierarchical approaches based on multiple classifiers and that each of its components plays an important role in the recognition of general-purpose communicative functionsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Subjektivierte Taylorisierung: Organisation und Praxis medienvermittelter Dienstleistungsarbeit

"Das Buch präsentiert vor dem Hintergrund eines empirischen Forschungsprojektes mit der Perspektive der subjektivierten Taylorisierung einen neuen Blick auf medienvermittelte Dienstleistungen. Jenseits euphemistischer Verweise auf ganzheitliche Aspekte berücksichtigende Arbeitsorganisation, wie sie insbesondere den betrieblichen Selbstdarstellungen eigen sind, aber auch in Distanz zu fatalistisch anmutenden Diagnosen rein tayloristischer Arbeitspraxis wird die Organisation medienvermittelter Arbeit in Call Centern als lebendige Auseinandersetzung zwischen betrieblichen Akteuren gefasst, die eine facettenreiche Arbeitswirklichkeit konstruiert. Die im Zuge der Rationalisierung der Kundenbeziehungen ursprünglich nur als notwendige Ergänzung technisierter Kommunikationswege vorgesehene Nutzung personaler Qualitäten der Arbeitenden verselbständigt sich: statt partieller Kompetenzen wird die ganze Person in die Tätigkeit eingebracht. Den Beschäftigten kommt die Rolle eines mehr oder weniger offen agierenden eigensinnigen Akteurs zu, der individuelle Ansprüche an die Arbeit unter Umständen nicht nur (ggf. kollektiv) formuliert, sondern alltäglich praktiziert. Das Management sieht sich vor einen neuen Legitimationsdruck hinsichtlich des eigenen Wirkens gestellt und zieht sich durch das Delegieren praxisnaher Gestaltungsfelder an untere Hierarchieebenen auf Rahmensetzungen und deren Kontrolle zurück. In diesen gegenläufigen Bewegungen des Eindringens und des Rückzugs etabliert sich eine Arbeitswirklichkeit, die gleichermaßen durch kleinteilige Kontrolle wie partiell große Freiräume gekennzeichnet ist. Subjektivierte Taylorisierung stellt damit eine erweiterte Entäußerung personaler Kompetenzen wie den Zwang zur, aber auch die Chance auf ausgeweitete Partizipation dar." (Autorenreferat

Downward compatible revision of dialogue annotation

This paper discusses some aspects of revising the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation (ISO 24617-2). The revision is aimed at making annotations using the ISO scheme more accurate and at providing more powerful tools for building natural language based dialogue systems, without invalidating the annotated resources that have been built, with the current version of the standard. In support of the revision of the standard, an analysis is provided of the downward compatibility of a revised annotation scheme with the original scheme at the levels of abstract syntax, concrete syntax, and semantics of annotations

FlowEval: A Consensus-Based Dialogue Evaluation Framework Using Segment Act Flows

Despite recent progress in open-domain dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. We explore the potential of dialogue evaluation featuring dialog act information, which was hardly explicitly modeled in previous methods. However, defined at the utterance level in general, dialog act is of coarse granularity, as an utterance can contain multiple segments possessing different functions. Hence, we propose segment act, an extension of dialog act from utterance level to segment level, and crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it. To utilize segment act flows, sequences of segment acts, for evaluation, we develop the first consensus-based dialogue evaluation framework, FlowEval. This framework provides a reference-free approach for dialog evaluation by finding pseudo-references. Extensive experiments against strong baselines on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and other desirable characteristics of our FlowEval, pointing out a potential path for better dialogue evaluation.Comment: EMNLP 2022 camera-ready versio