The ability to model and automatically detect dialogue act is an important step toward understanding spontaneous speech and Instant Messages. However, it has been difficult to infer a dialogue act from a surface utterance because it highly depends on the context of the utterance and speaker linguistic knowledge; especially in Arabic dialects. This paper proposes a statistical dialogue analysis model to recognize utterance’s dialogue acts using a multi-classes hierarchical structure. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from a dialogue corpus were collected and annotated manually from multi-genre Egyptian call-centers. Extensive experiments were conducted using Support Vector Machines classifier to evaluate the system performance. The results attained in the term of average F-measure scores of 0.912; showed that the proposed approach has moderately improved F-measure by approximately 20%.
@InProceedings{ELMADANY18.1099, author = {AbdelRahim Elmadany and Sherif Abdou and Mervat Gheith}, title = "{Improving Dialogue Act Classification for Spontaneous Arabic Speech and Instant Messages at Utterance Level}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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