11 research outputs found
Deep Dialog Act Recognition using Multiple Token, Segment, and Context Information Representations
Dialog act (DA) recognition is a task that has been widely explored over the
years. Recently, most approaches to the task explored different DNN
architectures to combine the representations of the words in a segment and
generate a segment representation that provides cues for intention. In this
study, we explore means to generate more informative segment representations,
not only by exploring different network architectures, but also by considering
different token representations, not only at the word level, but also at the
character and functional levels. At the word level, in addition to the commonly
used uncontextualized embeddings, we explore the use of contextualized
representations, which provide information concerning word sense and segment
structure. Character-level tokenization is important to capture
intention-related morphological aspects that cannot be captured at the word
level. Finally, the functional level provides an abstraction from words, which
shifts the focus to the structure of the segment. We also explore approaches to
enrich the segment representation with context information from the history of
the dialog, both in terms of the classifications of the surrounding segments
and the turn-taking history. This kind of information has already been proved
important for the disambiguation of DAs in previous studies. Nevertheless, we
are able to capture additional information by considering a summary of the
dialog history and a wider turn-taking context. By combining the best
approaches at each step, we achieve results that surpass the previous
state-of-the-art on generic DA recognition on both SwDA and MRDA, two of the
most widely explored corpora for the task. Furthermore, by considering both
past and future context, simulating annotation scenario, our approach achieves
a performance similar to that of a human annotator on SwDA and surpasses it on
MRDA.Comment: 38 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables, submitted to JAI
A Study on Dialog Act Recognition using Character-Level Tokenization
Dialog act recognition is an important step for dialog systems since it
reveals the intention behind the uttered words. Most approaches on the task use
word-level tokenization. In contrast, this paper explores the use of
character-level tokenization. This is relevant since there is information at
the sub-word level that is related to the function of the words and, thus,
their intention. We also explore the use of different context windows around
each token, which are able to capture important elements, such as affixes.
Furthermore, we assess the importance of punctuation and capitalization. We
performed experiments on both the Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus and the DIHANA
Corpus. In both cases, the experiments not only show that character-level
tokenization leads to better performance than the typical word-level
approaches, but also that both approaches are able to capture complementary
information. Thus, the best results are achieved by combining tokenization at
both levels.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, AIMSA 201
Discourse-Based Evaluation of Language Understanding
We introduce DiscEval, a compilation of evaluation datasets with a focus
on discourse, that can be used for evaluation of English Natural Language
Understanding when considering meaning as use. We make the case that evaluation
with discourse tasks is overlooked and that Natural Language Inference (NLI)
pretraining may not lead to the learning really universal representations.
DiscEval can also be used as supplementary training data for multi-task
learning-based systems, and is publicly available, alongside the code for
gathering and preprocessing the datasets
Reconocimiento de acto de diálogo secuencial para debates argumentativos árabes
Dialogue act recognition remains a primordial task that helps user to automatically identify participants’ intentions. In this paper, we propose a sequential approach consisting of segmentation followed by annotation process to identify dialogue acts within Arabic politic debates. To perform DA recognition, we used the CARD corpus labeled using the SADA annotation schema. Segmentation and annotation tasks were then carried out using Conditional Random Fields probabilistic models as they prove high performance in segmenting and labeling sequential data. Learning results are notably important for the segmentation task (F-score=97.9%) and relatively reliable within the annotation process (f-score=63.4%) given the complexity of identifying argumentative tags and the presence of disfluencies in spoken conversations.El reconocimiento del acto de diálogo sigue siendo una tarea primordial que ayuda al usuario a identificar automáticamente las intenciones de los participantes. En este documento, proponemos un enfoque secuencial que consiste en la segmentación seguida de un proceso de anotación para identificar actos de diálogo dentro de los debates políticos árabes. Para realizar el reconocimiento DA, utilizamos el corpus CARD etiquetado utilizando el esquema de anotación SADA. Las tareas de segmentación y anotación se llevaron a cabo utilizando modelos probabilísticos de Campos aleatorios condicionales, ya que demuestran un alto rendimiento en la segmentación y el etiquetado de datos secuenciales. Los resultados de aprendizaje son especialmente importantes para la tarea de segmentación (F-score = 97.9%) y relativamente confiables dentro del proceso de anotación (f-score = 63.4%) dada la complejidad de identificar etiquetas argumentativas y la presencia de disfluencias en las conversaciones habladas
Surface and Contextual Linguistic Cues in Dialog Act Classification: A Cognitive Science View
What role do linguistic cues on a surface and contextual level have in identifying the intention behind an utterance? Drawing on the wealth of studies and corpora from the computational task of dialog act classification, we studied this question from a cognitive science perspective. We first reviewed the role of linguistic cues in dialog act classification studies that evaluated model performance on three of the most commonly used English dialog act corpora. Findings show that frequency‐based, machine learning, and deep learning methods all yield similar performance. Classification accuracies, moreover, generally do not explain which specific cues yield high performance. Using a cognitive science approach, in two analyses, we systematically investigated the role of cues in the surface structure of the utterance and cues of the surrounding context individually and combined. By comparing the explained variance, rather than the prediction accuracy of these cues in a logistic regression model, we found that (1) while surface and contextual linguistic cues can complement each other, surface linguistic cues form the backbone in human dialog act identification, (2) with word frequency statistics being particularly important for the dialog act, and (3) the similar trends across corpora, despite differences in the type of dialog, corpus setup, and dialog act tagset. The importance of surface linguistic cues in dialog act classification sheds light on how both computers and humans take advantage of these cues in speech act recognition