Speaker Turn Modeling for Dialogue Act Classification

Zihao He, Leili Tavabi, Kristina Lerman, Mohammad Soleymani


Abstract
Dialogue Act (DA) classification is the task of classifying utterances with respect to the function they serve in a dialogue. Existing approaches to DA classification model utterances without incorporating the turn changes among speakers throughout the dialogue, therefore treating it no different than non-interactive written text. In this paper, we propose to integrate the turn changes in conversations among speakers when modeling DAs. Specifically, we learn conversation-invariant speaker turn embeddings to represent the speaker turns in a conversation; the learned speaker turn embeddings are then merged with the utterance embeddings for the downstream task of DA classification. With this simple yet effective mechanism, our model is able to capture the semantics from the dialogue content while accounting for different speaker turns in a conversation. Validation on three benchmark public datasets demonstrates superior performance of our model.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.185
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2150–2157
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.185
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.185
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zihao He, Leili Tavabi, Kristina Lerman, and Mohammad Soleymani. 2021. Speaker Turn Modeling for Dialogue Act Classification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 2150–2157, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Speaker Turn Modeling for Dialogue Act Classification (He et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.185.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.185.mp4
Code
 zaghe568/speak-turn-emb-dialog-act-clf
Data
MRDASwitchboard-1 Corpus