Training a Prosody-Based Dialog Act Tagger from Unlabeled Data

Citation

Venkataraman, A., Ferrer, L., Stolcke, A., & Shriberg, E. (2003, April). Training a prosody-based dialog act tagger from unlabeled data. In 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings.(ICASSP’03). (Vol. 1, pp. I-I). IEEE.

Abstract

Dialog act tagging is an important step toward speech understanding, yet training such taggers usually requires large amounts of data labeled by linguistic experts. Here we investigate the use of unlabeled data for training HMM-based dialog act taggers. Three techniques are shown to be effective for bootstrapping a tagger from very small amounts of labeled data: iterative relabeling and retraining on unlabeled data; a dialog grammar to model dialog act context, and a model of the prosodic correlates of dialog acts. On the SPINE dialog corpus, the combined use of prosodic information and unlabeled data reduces the tagging error between 12 and 16 pct, compared to baseline systems using word information and various amounts of labeled data only.


Read more from SRI

  • surgeons around a surgical robot

    The SRI research behind today’s surgical robotics

    Intuitive’s da Vinci 5 system represents a major leap in robotic-assisted medicine. It all started at SRI, which continues to advance teleoperation technologies.

  • a collage of digital graphs

    A banner year for quantum

    SRI-managed QED-C’s annual report on quantum trends captures an industry accelerating rapidly from technical promise toward major global impact.

  • ICE Cube containing SRI’s aerogel experiment, photographed prior to launch. Source: Aerospace Applications North America

    An SRI carbon capture experiment launches into space

    By synthesizing carbon-absorbing aerogels in microgravity, SRI research will give us a rare glimpse into how these materials could be radically improved.