An Integrated Dialogue Analysis Model for Determining Speech Acts and Discourse Structures

Analysis of speech acts and discourse structures is essential to a dialogue understanding system because speech acts and discourse structures are closely tied with the speaker’s intention. However, it has been difficult to infer a speech act and a discourse structure from a surface utterance because they highly depend on the context of the utterance. We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using a maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from an annotated dialogue corpus. Moreover, the model can analyze speech acts and discourse structures in one framework. In the experiment, the model showed better performance than other previous works. key words: speech act analysis, discourse structure analysis, maximum entropy model, statistical dialogue analysis model