Model Adaptation for Dialog Act Tagging

In this paper, we analyze the effect of model adaptation for dialog act tagging. The goal of adaptation is to improve the performance of the tagger using out-of-domain data or models. Dialog act tagging aims to provide a basis for further discourse analysis and understanding in conversational speech. In this study we used the ICSI meeting corpus with high-level meeting recognition dialog act (MRDA) tags, that is, question, statement, backchannel, disruptions, and floor grabbers/holders. We performed controlled adaptation experiments using the Switchboard (SWBD) corpus with SWBD-DAMSL tags as the out-of-domain corpus. Our results indicate that we can achieve significantly better dialog act tagging by automatically selecting a subset of the Switchboard corpus and combining the confidences obtained by both in-domain and out-of-domain models via logistic regression, especially when the in-domain data is limited.