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A Machine Learning Approach to Speech Act Classification Using Function Words

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6071))

Abstract

This paper presents a novel technique for the classification of sentences as Dialogue Acts, based on structural information contained in function words. It focuses on classifying questions or non-questions as a generally useful task in agent-based systems. The proposed technique extracts salient features by replacing function words with numeric tokens and replacing each content word with a standard numeric wildcard token. The Decision Tree, which is a well-established classification technique, has been chosen for this work. Experiments provide evidence of potential for highly effective classification, with a significant achievement on a challenging dataset, before any optimisation of feature extraction has taken place.

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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O’Shea, J., Bandar, Z., Crockett, K. (2010). A Machine Learning Approach to Speech Act Classification Using Function Words. In: Jędrzejowicz, P., Nguyen, N.T., Howlet, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds) Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications. KES-AMSTA 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6071. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13541-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13541-5_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13540-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13541-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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