Identification of Social Acts in Dialogue

The emergence of dialogue on social medial neccessitates the development of new dialogue processing models. We argue that to address coherence and to infer the implicatures of social dialogue it is vital to understand the social aspirations of the dialogue participants. One key aspect of understanding social dialogue is to understand the intentions and goals of participants. In this paper, we present 11 social acts that capture a broad number of social intentions and goals. We define social acts as pragmatic speech acts designed to give insight into the socio-cognitive processes that individuals unconsciously go through when communicating in dialogue. Identification of the social acts is done using a combination of a generative model in which utterances are generated from gappy patterns, which define a given social act, and a series of binary classifiers. Our experimentation shows that we can capture these social acts with an overall F-measure of 50.4%.