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Conversational role assignment problem in multi-party dialogues. Natasa Jovanovic Dennis Reidsma Rutger Rienks TKI group University of Twente. Outline. Research tasks at TKI Interpretation of multimodal human-human communication in the meetings
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Conversational role assignment problem in multi-party dialogues Natasa Jovanovic Dennis Reidsma Rutger Rienks TKI group University of Twente
Outline • Research tasks at TKI • Interpretation of multimodal human-human communication in the meetings • Conversational Role Assignment Problem (CRAP) • Towards automatic addressee detection
Who is talking to whom? • CRAP as one of the main issues in multi- parity conversation (Traum 2003.) • Taxonomy of conversational roles (Herbert K. Clark) speaker addressee side participant bystander all participants all listener eavesdropper
Our goal: • Automatic addressee identification in small group discussions • Addressees in meeting conversations: single participant, group of people, whole audience • Importance of the issue of addressing in multi-party dialogues
Addressing mechanisms • What are relevant sources of information for addressee identification in the face-to-face meeting conversations? • How does the speaker express who is the addressee of his utterance? • How can we combine all this information in order to determine the addressee of the utterance?
Sources of information • Speech • Linguistic markers • word classes: personal pronouns, determiners in combination with personal pronouns, possessive pronouns and adjectives, indefinite pronouns, etc. • Name detection ( vocatives) • Dialogue acts • Gaze direction • Pointing gestures • Context categories(features)
Dialogue Acts and Addressee detection (I) • How many addresses may have an utterance? • According to dialog act theory an utterance or an utterance segment may have more than one conversational function. • Each DA has a addressee ==> an utterance may have several addresses
Dialogue Acts and Addressee detection (II) • MRDA (Meeting Recorder Dialogue Acts)– tag set for labeling multiparty face to face meetings (ICSI) • We use a huge subset of the MRDA set which is organized on two levels: • Forward looking functions (FLF ) • Backward looking functions (BLF)
Non-verbal features • Gaze • Contribution of the gaze to the addressee detection is dependent on: participants’ location (visible area), utterance length, current meeting action • Turn-taking behavior and addressing behavior • Gesture ( pointing at a person) • TALK_TO (X,Y) AND POINT_TO (X,Y) • TALK_TO( X,Y) AND POINT_TO (X,Z) – X talk to Y about Z
Context categories • Bunt: “totality of conditions that may influence understanding and generation of communicative behavior” • Local context is an aspect of context that can be changed through communication • Context categories: • Interaction history ( verbal and non-verbal) • Meeting action history • Spatial context (participants’ location, distance, visible area, etc. ) • User context (name, gender, roles, etc. )
Towards an automatic addressee detection • Manual or automatic features annotation? • An automatic target interpreter has to deal with uncertainty • Methods: • Rule-based method • Statistical method ( Bayesian networks)
Rule-based method • Processing information obtained from the utterance ( linguistic markers, vocatives, DA). The result is a list of possible addressees with corresponding probabilities • Eliminate cases where target is completely determined (for instance, name in vocative form) • Set of rules for BLF • Set of rules for FLF • Processing gaze and gesture information adding the additional probability values to the candidates
Meeting actions and addressee detection • Automatic addressee detection method can be applied to the whole meeting • Knowledge about the current meeting action as well as about meeting actions history may help to better recognize the addressee of a dialogue act.
Future works • Development of multimodal annotation tool • Data annotation for • training and evaluating statistical models • obtaining inputs for rule-based methods • New meeting scenarios for research in addressing