Dialog act

A dialog act is a specialized speech act. For example, Question is a speech act, but Question_on_hotel is a dialog act. Dialog acts are different in different dialog systems. The number of speech acts are commonly recognized, and is stable around 10 or so, the number of dialog acts vary from systems to systems. In some systems ^[1], the number of dialog acts can be up to 40.

The research on dialog acts have increased since 1999, after spoken dialog systems became commercial reality.

List of dialog acts

• Generic (speech acts)
  • greetings
  • Meta Question: "What can I say?"
  • Yes-No Question
  • Statement
  • Request
  • Wh-Question
• Domain specific

Identify a dialog act

• Script-based method
• Learning-based method

References

1. ^ Stolcke, Andreas; Ries, Klaus; Coccaro, Noah; Shriberg, Elizabeth; Bates, Rebecca; Jurafsky, Daniel; Taylor, Paul; Martin, Rachel et al. (2000), "Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech", Computational Linguistics 26 (3): 339, doi:10.1162/089120100561737, http://www.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/ws97/CL-dialog.pdf