Dialogue Act Detection from Human-Human Spoken Conversations

Abstract

Accurate detection of dialogue acts is essential for understanding human conversations and to recognize emotions. This requires 1) the segmentation of human-human dialogs into turns, 2) the intra-turn segmentation into DA boundaries and 3) the classification of each segment according to a DA tag. Most dialogue act classification models approaches the problem of identifying the different DA segments within an utterance in separate fashion: first, DA boundary segmentation within an utterance was addressed with generative or discriminative approaches then, DA labels were assigned to such boundaries based on multi-classification. This paper, presents an effective approach to improve the accuracy of dialogue act recognition from speech signal by combining acoustic and linguistic features. This paper adopts the use of a silence removal algorithm based on Mahalanobis Distance for the segmentation of human-human dialogs into turns and proposes the keyword spotting feature to reduce the ambiguity of opinion vs. non-opinion statements and agreements vs. acknowledgements, occurs while classifying the dialogue acts.

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