{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/contextual-dialogue-act-classification-for","title":"Contextual Dialogue Act Classification for Open-Domain Conversational Agents","arxiv_id":"2005.13804","date":"2020-05-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ali Ahmadvand","Jason Ingyu Choi","Eugene Agichtein"],"abstract":"Classifying the general intent of the user utterance in a conversation, also known as Dialogue Act (DA), e.g., open-ended question, statement of opinion, or request for an opinion, is a key step in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for conversational agents. While DA classification has been extensively studied in human-human conversations, it has not been sufficiently explored for the emerging open-domain automated conversational agents. Moreover, despite significant advances in utterance-level DA classification, full understanding of dialogue utterances requires conversational context. Another challenge is the lack of available labeled data for open-domain human-machine conversations. To address these problems, we propose a novel method, CDAC (Contextual Dialogue Act Classifier), a simple yet effective deep learning approach for contextual dialogue act classification. Specifically, we use transfer learning to adapt models trained on human-human conversations to predict dialogue acts in human-machine dialogues. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we train our model on the well-known Switchboard human-human dialogue dataset, and fine-tune it for predicting dialogue acts in human-machine conversation data, collected as part of the Amazon Alexa Prize 2018 competition. The results show that the CDAC model outperforms an utterance-level state of the art baseline by 8.0% on the Switchboard dataset, and is comparable to the latest reported state-of-the-art contextual DA classification results. Furthermore, our results show that fine-tuning the CDAC model on a small sample of manually labeled human-machine conversations allows CDAC to more accurately predict dialogue acts in real users' conversations, suggesting a promising direction for future improvements.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13804v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.13804v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"contextual-dialogue-act-classification-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/emory-irlab/CDAC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification-1","task_name":"Classification"},{"task_slug":"dialogue-act-classification","task_name":"Dialogue Act Classification"},{"task_slug":"classification","task_name":"General Classification"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-understanding","task_name":"Natural Language Understanding"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2005.13804","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}