Multifunctional ISO Standard Dialogue Act Tagging in Italian

Abstract

English. The task of Dialogue Act (DA) tagging, a crucial component in many conversational agents, is often addressed assuming a single DA per speaker turn in the conversation. However, speakers’ turns are often multifunctional, that is they can contain more than one DA (i.e. “I’m Alex. Have we met before?” contains a ‘state-ment’, followed by a ‘question’). This work focuses on multifunctional DA tagging in Italian. First, we present iLIS-TEN2ISO, a novel resource with multi-functional DA annotation in Italian, created by annotating the iLISTEN corpus with the ISO standard. We provide an analysis of the corpus showing the importance of multifunctionality for DA tagging. Additionally, we train DA taggers for Italian on iLISTEN (achieving State of the Art results) and iLISTEN2ISO. Our findings indicate the importance of using a multifunctional approach for DA tagging.