Dialog act classification with the help of prosody

This paper presents automatic methods for the segmentation and classification of dialog acts (DA). In VERBMOBIL it is often sufficient to recognize the sequence of DAs occurring during a dialog between the two partners. Since a turn can consist of one or more successive DAs we conduct the classification of DAs in a two step procedure. First each turn has to be segmented into units which correspond to a DA and second the DA categories have to be identified. For the segmentation we use polygrams and multi-layer perceptrons, using prosodic features. The classification of DAs is done with semantic classification trees and polygrams.