MIDAS: A Dialog Act Annotation Scheme for Open Domain HumanMachine Spoken Conversations

Dian Yu, Zhou Yu


Abstract
Dialog act prediction in open-domain conversations is an essential language comprehension task for both dialog system building and discourse analysis. Previous dialog act schemes, such as SWBD-DAMSL, are designed mainly for discourse analysis in human-human conversations. In this paper, we present a dialog act annotation scheme, MIDAS (Machine Interaction Dialog Act Scheme), targeted at open-domain human-machine conversations. MIDAS is designed to assist machines to improve their ability to understand human partners. MIDAS has a hierarchical structure and supports multi-label annotations. We collected and annotated a large open-domain human-machine spoken conversation dataset (consisting of 24K utterances). To validate our scheme, we leveraged transfer learning methods to train a multi-label dialog act prediction model and reached an F1 score of 0.79.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.94
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1103–1120
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.94
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.94
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dian Yu and Zhou Yu. 2021. MIDAS: A Dialog Act Annotation Scheme for Open Domain HumanMachine Spoken Conversations. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 1103–1120, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MIDAS: A Dialog Act Annotation Scheme for Open Domain HumanMachine Spoken Conversations (Yu & Yu, EACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.94.pdf