Dialogue Act Classification Based on Intra-Utterance Features∗

We present recent work in the area of Dialogue Act (DA) tagging. Identifying the dialogue acts of utterances is recognised as an important step towards understanding the content and nature of what speakers say. Our experiments investigate the use of a simple dialogue act classifier based on purely intra-utterance features — principally involving word n-gram cue phrases. Such a classifier performs surprisingly well, rivalling scores obtained using far more sophisticated language modelling techniques for the corpus we address. We also discuss the potential utility of classifiers that identify the n most likely dialogue acts for each utterance, leaving it to some later process to choose amongst these alternatives.