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 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]