Automatic recognition of customer requests in Estonian information dialogues Cover Image

Kliendi soovide automaatne tuvastamine eestikeelsetes infodialoogides
Automatic recognition of customer requests in Estonian information dialogues

Author(s): Mare Koit, Riina Kasterpalu, Evely Vutt, Andriela Rääbis, Olga Gerassimenko, Tiit Hennoste, Maret Valdisoo, Krista Strandson
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühing (ERÜ)
Keywords: dialogue corpus; dialogue act recognition; conversation analysis; Estonian

Summary/Abstract: The goal of the paper is to find out linguistic cues which can be used for automatic recognition of dialogue acts by the computer. We limit us with customer requests here which are the most important acts for modelling the dialogue on the computer. We have chosen 114 dialogues from the Estonian Dialogue Corpus of the University of Tartu. Four situational groups are represented in the dialogues: directory inquiries (phone numbers, addresses, etc), calls for taxi, calls to travel agencies, calls to outpatients’ offices. There were 130 customer requests in our analysed corpus. Customers ask either for information or for an action of the operator. As the analysis demonstrates, only certain modes and persons of certain verbs can be used in order to express requests. Certain verbs are systematically related to certain contextual conditions. We represent the structure of a dialogue as a sequence of dialogue acts using Markov chain. It helps the computer to recognise the user acts and adequately react to them.

  • Issue Year: 2007
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 135-154
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Estonian