Automatically predicting dialogue structure using prosodic features
Spoken dialogue systems need to track dialogue structure in order to conduct sensible conversations. In previous work, we used only a shallow analysis of past dialogue in predicting the current dialogue act. Here we show that a hierarchical analysis of dialogue structure can significantly improve dialogue act recognition. Our approach is to integrate dialogue act recognition with speech recognition, seeking a best overall hypothesis for what words have been spoken and what dialogue act they represent, in the light of both the dialogue history so far and the current speech signal. A useful feature of this approach is that intonation can be used to aid dialogue act recognition by combining it with other information sources in a natural way.
prediction dialogue acts recognition intonation prosody duration moves games discourse function