3 Speech Acts and Dialogue Management

In this lecture we are going to talk about the use of speech acts in dialogue management. In Section 3.1 we will give an introduction to what speech acts are.

Section 3.2 we will concentrate on how speech acts can facilitate dialogue management and Section 3.3 will briefly consider some examples of existing dialogue act taxonimies.

In Section 3.4 the TRIPS system architecture will be considered. This is a system based on speech acts. Looking into it will enable an insight into how the use of speech acts can be integrated in dialogue management and taken advantage of.

The practical exercise in Section 3.6 will ask you to annotate a small dialogue excerpt in order to get better acquainted with the use of speech acts and the problems involved.

• 3.1 Introduction to Speech Acts
  • 3.1.1 The background
  • 3.1.2 What are speech acts and what do they do?
  • 3.1.3 Searle's Classification of Speech Acts

• 3.2 Speech Acts in Dialogue Management
  • 3.2.1 Important Aspects
  • 3.2.2 Context and Dialogue Management
  • 3.2.3 More Context

• 3.3 Example Dialogue Annotation Schemes
  • 3.3.1 Introduction of Dialogue Acts
  • 3.3.2 HCRC Map task
  • 3.3.3 HCRC Map task: Levels of annotation
  • 3.3.4 Verbmobil 2
  • 3.3.5 Verbmobil 2: Levels of annotation
  • 3.3.6 TRAINS
  • 3.3.7 TRAINS: The approach
  • 3.3.8 DAMSL
  • 3.3.9 DAMSL: The scheme
  • 3.3.10 Automated tagging of dialogue acts

• 3.4 TRIPS
  • 3.4.1 System Architecture
  • 3.4.2 Human-computer communication
  • 3.4.3 The Interpretation Manager
  • 3.4.4 The Speech recogniser
  • 3.4.5 The Chart parser
  • 3.4.6 Task Manager
  • 3.4.7 The Reference and Discourse Context Components
  • 3.4.8 The Generation Manager
  • 3.4.9 Speech acts in TRIPS

• 3.5 References

• 3.6 Practical exercise.
  • 3.6.1 A small dialogue act taxonomy
  • 3.6.2 Instructions

• 3.7 Comments on the Exercise
  • 3.7.1 Annotation reliability
  • 3.7.2 Multi-functional utterances
  • 3.7.3 Sub-dialogues
  • 3.7.4 An example annotation