Identification of Social Acts in Dialogue

Proceedings of COLING 2012: Technical Papers, pages 375–390, COLING 2012, Mumbai, December 2012. Identification of Social Acts in Dialogue David B. Bracewell, Marc T. Tomlinson, and Hui Wang Language Computer Corporation Richardson, TX {david,marc,hui}@languagecomputer.com Abstract The emergence of dialogue on social medial neccessitates the development of new dialogue processing models. We argue that to address coherence and to infer the implicatures of social dialogue it is vital to understand the social aspirations of the dialogue participants. One key aspect of understanding social dialogue is to understand the intentions and goals of participants. In this paper, we present 11 social acts that capture a broad number of social intentions and goals. We define social acts as pragmatic speech acts designed to give insight into the socio-cognitive processes that individuals unconsciously go through when communicating in dialogue. Identification of the social acts is done using a combination of a generative model in which utterances are generated from gappy patterns, which define a given social act, and a series of binary classifiers. Our experimentation shows that we can capture these social acts with an overall F-measure of 50.4%. Keywords: dialogue, social actions, online communication, speech acts, social goals, social implicature. 375 1 Introduction Traditional approaches to dialogue processing have been primarily focused on task-based (Grosz, 1978; Traum and Hinkelman, 1992) dialogue. In addition, the recognition of speech acts has proved useful for identifying the structure of the dialogue which takes place in formal meetings (Shriberg et al., 2004) where the dialogue is often a function of the job or position of the participants. Theories of the coherence of discourse and discourse relations (Barzilay and Lapata, 2005; Byron and Stent, 1998; Hobbs, 1979, 1985; Mann and Thompson, 1988; Marcu and Echihabi, 2002) have proved useful for the semantic interpretation of discourse. However, in the world of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media where people voluntarily join in the conversation, dialogue is often focused on the social engagements between participants. These social dialogues are often not driven by a common group task, goal or purpose, but by the social aspirations of the participants. As an example let us examine the following excerpt of dialogue from a political debate forum: A) Seriously, how can anybody still support this president’s economic policies? How can HE just continue to do the same things and why can’t HE take responsibility for the lousy economy??? B) Not to worry, last time we had a democrat president that was this bad, we had a huge victory! C) Being neither a Republican or Democrat I wonder if a Republican administration would have done any better? We know McCain’s proposed tax and spending policies during the 2008 election would have led to even larger deficits than what Obama was proposing at the time. Not to mention the bailouts and TARP of Bush. D)What about the showing that when Obama took office, the economy was spiraling down with -9% real rate, losing 700,000+ jobs a month, skyrocketing unemployment, and the stock markets were crashing …

Content truncated to 500 words