Utterance Topic Identification in Spoken Dialogues
Bo Xu · Zhongwen xinxi xuebao · 2005
This paper investigates how to identify utterance topics in spontaneous spoken dialogues based on some shallow semantic analysis. First the topic of an utterance is defined as the salient semantic entity its speaker focuses his/her attention on. Then we discuss two features of such a topic (i.e., topic as discourse construct and topic continuity) and the relationship between utterance topic and (extended) sentence type. According to these an algorithm is established to identify utterance topic and evaluated in a spoken dialogue corpus. The results achieve an accuracy of 61.1～87.6%, depending on different sources of extended sentence type and different accuracy definitions.