The Role of Affect Analysis in Dialogue Act Identification

We present a qualitative analysis of the lexicon of dialogue acts: we explore the relationship between the communicative goal of an utterance and its affective lexicon as well as the salience of specific word classes for each speech act. Thought not constituting any deep understanding of the dialogue, automatic dialogue act labeling is a task that may be relevant for a wide range of applications in both human-computer and human-human interaction. The experiments described in this paper fit in the scope of a research study whose long-term goal is to build an unsupervised classifier that simply exploits the lexical semantics of utterances to automatically annotate dialogues with the proper speech acts.