Dialogue Act Taxonomy Interoperability Using a Meta-model

Dialogue act taxonomies, such as those of DAMSL, DiAML or the HCRC dialogue structure, can be incorporated into a larger meta-model by breaking down their labels into primitive functional features. Doing so enables the re-exploitation of annotated data for automatic dialogue act recognition tasks across taxonomies, i.e. it gives us the means to make a classifier learn from data annotated according to taxonomies different from the target taxonomy. We propose a meta-model covering several well-known taxonomies of dialogue acts, and we demonstrate its usefulness for the task of cross-taxonomy dialogue act recognition.