Dialogue Act Recognition via CRF-Attentive Structured Network

Dialogue Act Recognition (DAR) is a challenging problem in dialogue interpretation, which aims to associate semantic labels to utterances and characterize the speaker's intention. Currently, many existing approaches formulate the DAR problem ranging from multi-classification to structured prediction, which suffer from hand-crafted feature extensions and attentive contextual dependencies. In this paper, we tackle the problem of DAR from the viewpoint of extending richer Conditional Random Field (CRF) structured dependencies without abandoning end-to-end training. We incorporate hierarchical semantic inference with memory mechanism on the utterance modeling at multiple levels. We then utilize the structured attention network on the linear-chain CRF to dynamically separate the utterances into cliques. The extensive experiments on two primary benchmark datasets Switchboard Dialogue Act (SWDA) and Meeting Recorder Dialogue Act (MRDA) datasets show that our method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art solutions to the problem.