Metrics for measuring domain independence of semantic classes
Andrew N. Pargellis, Eric Fosler‐Lussier, Alexandros Potamianos, Chin‐Hui Lee · 2001
The design of dialogue systems for a new domain requires se-mantic classes (concepts) to be identified and defined. This process could be made easier by importing relevant concepts from previously studied domains to the new one. We pro-pose two methodologies, based on comparison of semantic classes across domains, for determining which concepts are domain-independent, and which are specific to the new task. The concept-comparison technique uses a context-dependent Kullback-Leibler distance measurement to compare all pairwise combinations of semantic classes, one from each domain. The concept-projection method uses a similar metric to project a sin-gle semantic class from one domain into the lexical environment of another. Initial results show that both methods are good in-dicators of the degree of domain independence for a wide range of concepts, manually generated for three different tasks: Car-men (children’s game), Movie (information retrieval) and Travel (flight reservations). 1.