Classification of dialogue acts using prosodic features in Chinese spontaneous speech

Dialogue acts (DAs) indicate the meanings of the utterances at the aspect of speech act, e.g., whether an utterance is a question, statement, confirmation and so forth, which helps to understand the utterances. The understanding component of a dialogue system can be improved by knowing the dialogue acts of utterances. In this paper, we investigate the classification of the dialogue acts using prosodic features in EasyFlight, a Chinese spoken dialogue system for querying and booking flight tickets. The experiments are based on the domain-specified Chinese spontaneous speech corpus, which is collected for evaluating the performance of the dialogue system. Dialogue acts are labeled by hand. According to more than thirty prosodic features two types of DAs, Question and Statement are classified in the experiments, and the classification accuracy of 83% is obtained.