Dialogue acts in automatic dialogue interpreting

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate that for an adequate translation of an utterance spoken in a dialogue the dialogue act it performs has to be determined. We introduce an approach that automatically assigns types of dialogue acts to utterances on the basis of both micro- and macro-structural information. Technically, this assignment is realized by modeling preference rules as weighted defaults in the Description Logic system FLEX. The dialogue-act type of an utterance is determined by qualitatively minimizing the exceptions to these defaults. The results described here have been developed within the VERBMOBIL project, a project concerned with face-to-face dialogue interpreting funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF). We present the rather positive results of a first evaluation of this implementation showing the accuracy of dialogue act assignment.