In this paper, we present a semi-supervised method for automatic speech act recognition in email and forums. The major challenge of this task is due to lack of labeled data in these two genres. Our method leverages labeled data in the Switchboard-DAMSL and the Meeting Recorder Dialog Act database and applies simple domain adaptation techniques over a large amount of unlabeled email and forum data to address this problem. Our method uses automatically extracted features such as phrases and dependency trees, called subtree features, for semi-supervised learning. Empirical results demonstrate that our model is effective in email and forum speech act recognition.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.