A novel focus encoding scheme for addressee detection in multiparty interaction using machine learning algorithms

Addressee detection is a fundamental task for seamless dialogue management and turn taking in human-agent interaction. Though addressee detection is implicit in dyadic interaction, it becomes a challenging task when more than two participants are involved. This article proposes multiple addressee detection models based on smart feature selection and focus encoding schemes. The models are trained using different machine learning and deep learning algorithms. This research work improves existing baseline accuracies for addressee prediction on two datasets. In addition, the article explores the impact of different focus encoding schemes in several addressee detection cases. Finally, an implementation strategy for addressee detection model in real-time is discussed.