In this paper, we present an investigation into the use of cue phrases as a basis for dialogue act classification. We define what we mean by cue phrases, and describe how we extract them from a manually labelled corpus of dialogue. We describe one method of evaluating the usefulness of such cue phrases, by applying them directly as a classifier to unseen utterances. Once we have extracted cue p...

Cue-Based Dialogue Act Classification Nick Webb Supervisors: Yorick Wilks & Mark Hepple In this thesis, we will address three research questions relating to the discovery and use of cue phrases for Dialogue Act classification. Cue phrases are single words, or combinations of words in phrases, that can serve as reliable indicators of some discourse function. In our case, we are looking to automa...

Cue phrases are words and phrases such as now and by the way which may be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each may also be used to different effect. The question of how speakers and hearers distinguish between such uses of cue phrases has not been addressed in discourse studies to date. Based on a...

Knott's empirical study of cue phrases has resulted in a taxonomic classiication of some 150 cue phrases. The taxonomy can be viewed as a partial ordering on the set of phrases, and hence we can view cue phrase selection in terms of scalar implicature, following Hirschberg. We draw out some of the immediate consequences of this view, including the problematic status of the conventional/conversa...

We investigate the unsupervised detection of semi-fixed cue phrases such as “This paper proposes a novel approach. . . 1” from unseen text, on the basis of only a handful of seed cue phrases with the desired semantics. The problem, in contrast to bootstrapping approaches for Question Answering and Information Extraction, is that it is hard to find a constraining context for occurrences of semi-...

This paper investigates factors that can be used in discourse analysis, specifically, cohesive devices. The paper shows that cohesive devices such as cue phrases can provide information about the linkages inside a text. We propose three types of cue phrases (the ordinary cue phrases, noun-phrase cues, and verb-phrase cues). An algorithm to compute rhetorical relations between two elementary dis...

Cue phrases are linguistic expressions such as 'now' and 'welg tha t may explicitly mark the structure of a discourse. For example, while the cue phrase ' inczdcntally' may be used SENTENTIALLY as an adverbial, the DISCOUaSE use initiates a digression. In [8], we noted the ambiguity of cue phrases with respect to discourse and sentential usage and proposed an intonational model for their disamb...

Cue phrases may be used in a discourse sense to explicitly signal discourse structure, but also in a sen-tential sense to convey semantic rather than structural information. This paper explores the use of machine learning for classifying cue phrases as discourse or sen-tential. Two machine learning programs (cgrendel and C4.5) are used to induce classiication rules from sets of pre-classiied cu...

Cue phrases may be used in a dkozsrse sense to explicitly signal discourse structure, but also in a sepztent&l sense to convey semantic rather than structural information. This paper explores the use of machine learning for classifying cue phrases as discourse or sentential. Two machine learning programs (CGRENDEL and C4.5) are used to induce classification rules from sets of pre-classified cue...

Dialogue acts play an important role in modelling discourse phenomena in several components of modern dialogue systems. Many different features have been so far proposed for dialogue act recognition. In this report, we take a cue-based model approach, and use N grams in utterances in dialogue as cue phrases. In our experiment with the switchboard corpus, we obtained 57.1% classification accurac...