Dialogue acts are labels that categorize dialogue by meaning. They help researchers understand and model dialogue, and are important for artificial intelligence and natural language parsing. Dialogue acts can be simple or complex, and are often displayed in a column next to the dialogue. They can be visually represented in graphs or charts.
A dialogue act is a specific component of discourse that labels a piece of dialogue according to its category of meaning. The dialogue act relates to many of the more common types of dialogue, often line by line or statement by statement. Many researchers label parts of the dialogue with dialogue act labels to more accurately observe or model the dialogue.
Dialog act tags show what a speaker or writer is trying to convey. Some of these are fairly basic labels that express a more general function, while others can be more complex. Some of the more basic acts of dialogue include binaries. For example, a “yes or no answer” dialog tag matches the two possible future outcomes, a yes or a no.
Some types of designations of dialogue acts refer to general speech tasks. For example, the “greeting” dialog tag could be attached to any simple greeting such as the word “hello.” Some other simple dialog tags show a function more specifically. For example, the dialogue act “instruction” is a command to do something, where the dialogue tag “acknowledgement” simply shows that the speaker has heard a previous piece of dialogue from someone else.
Some simple acts of dialogue and tags require specific suffixes for parsing. The dialogue act tag, “query,” can take a “yes/no” or “open” suffix to designate a yes or no question or an open question. The “answer” dialog tag can have a suffix of “yes”, “no”, or “open”.
In many cases, researchers view the dialogue acts in a column next to the dialogue column. This helps the reader understand that each specific tag of the speech act corresponds to something a speaker is saying. By reading through both columns, the reader can understand how the dialogue acts represent the functions of the included dialogue.
The designation of dialogue acts is of paramount importance for a number of software technologies. One of them is artificial intelligence technology, where humans try to use machines to mimic human thinking or expression. Dialog act markers can also help with natural language parsing for the purpose of speech recognition or other types of software. They can be of paramount importance whenever a computer or machine needs to parse and analyze the meaning of recorded or written human speech.
In specific research applications, acts of dialogue are often expressly conveyed through visual graphs or charts. Researchers can use a sort of bubble map to show where the most common dialogue is acting in a conversation. Alternatively, researchers can simply use the two lines above, with some color coding or letters and numbers visually plotting different types of dialogue acts.
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