ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Vigsø, Denmark May 30 - June 2, 1995

Recognizing An Interactional Structure and Topics of Task-Oriented Dialogues

Toshiaki Iwadera, Masato Ishizaki, Tsuyoshi Morimoto

ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Labs., Kyoto, Japan

This paper proposes an incremental algorithm to recognize the interactional structure of task-oriented dialogues. The correctness of the algorithm is shown in the results of its application to dialogues in a "travel" domain. The algorithm consists of two major steps: (1) labeling a surface speech act to each utterance, and (2) constructing the dialogue's structure similar to that proposed by Discourse Analysis. We have proposed a structure independently from that by Discourse Analysis. We also propose an algorithm to recognize the topics and their transitions in a dialogue by using the proposed structure and a "topic duration" hypothesis. Because the labels used for building the structure are domain-independent, the algorithm is robust and efficient.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Iwadera, Toshiaki / Ishizaki, Masato / Morimoto, Tsuyoshi (1995): "Recognizing an interactional structure and topics of task-oriented dialogues", In SDS-1995, 41-44.