Research on discourse role recognition in task-oriented collaborative dialogue

Abstract

Task-oriented collaborative dialogues have become an indispensable form of communication in our daily work and learning, in which participants exchange ideas and share information to advance goals. It is crucial to automatically analyze participants’ contributions and understand these dialogues relative to individuals with limited attention spans. In this paper, seven Discourse Role (DR) labels are designed to describe discourse’s different roles in collaborative dialogues for goal achievement. We collected about 11K discourses from a publicly available dialogue corpus and annotated them with DR tags to construct a dataset named MRDR (Meeting Recorder Discourse Role). In addition, this paper proposes a novel hierarchical model, STTAHM (Speaker Turn and Topic-Aware Hierarchical Model), for Discourse Role classification. The model is equipped to perceive speaker turn and dialogue topic and can effectively capture the discourse’s local and global semantic information. Experimental results show that our proposed method is effective on the constructed dataset, and the accuracy of Discourse Role classification reaches 86.99%.