Modeling of Dialog Acts
Dialog act modeling is a significant problem in the area of conversational or discourse analysis. A dialog act is a specific kind of utterance in a bi or multi-party, synchronous or asynchronous conversation. There is a number of dialog acts defined by the [International Computer Science Institute | http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/] in their Meeting Recorder Project. The detailed dialog act labeling scheme can be found | here. Some of the dialog acts as identified in this manual are: Statement, Polite Mechanism, Yes-no question, Action motivator, Wh-question, Accept response, Open-ended question, Acknowledge and appreciate, and Reject response.
There has been a lot of work in this area. One of the attempts to do unsupervised modeling of dialog acts is presented in this [ Unsupervised Modeling of Dialog Acts in Asynchronous Conversation | paper]