Using Context Information for Dialog Act Classification in DNN Framework

Yang Liu, Kun Han, Zhao Tan, Yun Lei


Abstract
Previous work on dialog act (DA) classification has investigated different methods, such as hidden Markov models, maximum entropy, conditional random fields, graphical models, and support vector machines. A few recent studies explored using deep learning neural networks for DA classification, however, it is not clear yet what is the best method for using dialog context or DA sequential information, and how much gain it brings. This paper proposes several ways of using context information for DA classification, all in the deep learning framework. The baseline system classifies each utterance using the convolutional neural networks (CNN). Our proposed methods include using hierarchical models (recurrent neural networks (RNN) or CNN) for DA sequence tagging where the bottom layer takes the sentence CNN representation as input, concatenating predictions from the previous utterances with the CNN vector for classification, and performing sequence decoding based on the predictions from the sentence CNN model. We conduct thorough experiments and comparisons on the Switchboard corpus, demonstrate that incorporating context information significantly improves DA classification, and show that we achieve new state-of-the-art performance for this task.
Anthology ID:
D17-1231
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2170–2178
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1231
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1231
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Liu, Kun Han, Zhao Tan, and Yun Lei. 2017. Using Context Information for Dialog Act Classification in DNN Framework. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2170–2178, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Using Context Information for Dialog Act Classification in DNN Framework (Liu et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1231.pdf