Estimating User Communication Styles for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Juliana Miehle, Isabel Feustel, Julia Hornauer, Wolfgang Minker, Stefan Ultes


Abstract
We present a neural network approach to estimate the communication style of spoken interaction, namely the stylistic variations elaborateness and directness, and investigate which type of input features to the estimator are necessary to achive good performance. First, we describe our annotated corpus of recordings in the health care domain and analyse the corpus statistics in terms of agreement, correlation and reliability of the ratings. We use this corpus to estimate the elaborateness and the directness of each utterance. We test different feature sets consisting of dialogue act features, grammatical features and linguistic features as input for our classifier and perform classification in two and three classes. Our classifiers use only features that can be automatically derived during an ongoing interaction in any spoken dialogue system without any prior annotation. Our results show that the elaborateness can be classified by only using the dialogue act and the amount of words contained in the corresponding utterance. The directness is a more difficult classification task and additional linguistic features in form of word embeddings improve the classification results. Afterwards, we run a comparison with a support vector machine and a recurrent neural network classifier.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.68
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
540–548
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.68
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Juliana Miehle, Isabel Feustel, Julia Hornauer, Wolfgang Minker, and Stefan Ultes. 2020. Estimating User Communication Styles for Spoken Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 540–548, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Estimating User Communication Styles for Spoken Dialogue Systems (Miehle et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.68.pdf