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Identifying Questions & Requests in Conversation

Published: 03 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In building an automated conversation agent, that attempts to converse with a human with as human-like as possible manner, we require the agent to identify which dialogue act, or class, the sentence belongs to. Determining the sentence class of a spoken phrase is helpful in building an intelligent companion, because without it the response may seem out of place. In written language, sentences can be classified into three classes: Declarative, Interrogative, and Imperative. These classes indicate which dialogue act the sentence belongs to. What our system does is take spoken text, which contains no punctuation, and classify the text into the three aforementioned classes. In conversation, the type of spoken text can indicate the type of required response. Our system is able to classify spoken text with 82% accuracy on our semi-automatically constructed dataset.

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C3S2E '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International C* Conference on Computer Science & Software Engineering
August 2014
201 pages
ISBN:9781450327121
DOI:10.1145/2641483
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 August 2014

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