Dialogue Acts and Dialogue Structure

Abstract

This chapter discusses historical and recent work in dialogue act tagging and dialogue structure inference. Dialogue act tagging is a classification task in which utterances in dialogue are marked with the intentions of the speaker. It is possible to classify utterances using only features relating to the utterance itself (for example, words and prosodic features), but much work has also utilized dialogue-level features such as previous speaker and previous dialogue acts. The structure of dialogue can be represented by dialogue grammar, segmentation, or with a hierarchical structure.