Speaker-change Aware CRF for Dialogue Act Classification

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Recent work in Dialogue Act (DA) classification approaches the task as a sequence labeling problem, using neural network models coupled with a Conditional Random Field (CRF) as the last layer. CRF models the conditional probability of the target DA label sequence given the input utterance sequence. However, the task involves another important input sequence, that of speakers, which is ignored by previous work. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a simple modification of the CRF layer that takes speaker-change into account. Experiments on the SwDA corpus show that our modified CRF layer outperforms the original one, with very wide margins for some DA labels. Further, visualizations demonstrate that our CRF layer can learn meaningful, sophisticated transition patterns between DA label pairs conditioned on speaker-change in an end-to-end way. Code is publicly available.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCOLING 2020 - 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
EditorsDonia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages450-464
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148279
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2020 - Virtual, Online, Spain
Duration: 8 Dec 202013 Dec 2020

Publication series

NameCOLING 2020 - 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2020
Country/TerritorySpain
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/12/2013/12/20

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