The predictive power of game structure in dialogue act recognition: experimental results using maximum entropy estimation

Recognizing the dialogue act(s) performed by means of an utterance involves combining top-down expectations about the next likely ‘move’ in a dialogue with bottom-up information extracted from the speech signal. We compare two ways of generating expectations: one which makes the expectations depend only on the previous act, and one which also takes into account the fact that individual dialogue acts play a role as part of larger conversational structures (‘games’). Our results indicate that exploiting game structure does lead to improved expectations.