A Generative Joint, Additive, Sequential Model of Topics and Speech Acts in Patient-Doctor Communication
Byron Wallace, Thomas A Trikalinos, Michael Barton Laws, Ira B. Wilson, Eugene Charniak · 2013
We develop a novel generative model of conversation that jointly captures both the topical content and the speech act type associated with each utterance.Our model expresses both token emission and state transition probabilities as log-linear functions of separate components corresponding to topics and speech acts (and their interactions).We apply this model to a dataset comprising annotated patient-physician visits and show that the proposed joint approach outperforms a baseline univariate model.