linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and in particular in natural language understanding, a dialog act can be interpreted as the atomic units of a

conversation Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people. The development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization. The development of conversational skills in a new language is a frequent focus ...

, more fine-grained than utterances, characterized by a specific communicative function. Types of dialog acts include a question, a statement, or a request for action. Dialog acts are a type of

speech act In the philosophy of language and linguistics, a speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the mashed potatoes; could you please pas ...

. Dialog act recognition, also known as spoken utterance classification, is an important part of spoken language understanding. AI

inference Inferences are steps in logical reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinct ...

models or statistical models are used to recognize and classify dialog acts. A dialog system typically includes a taxonomy of dialog types or ''tags'' that classify the different functions dialog acts can play. One study had 42 types of dialog act in their taxonomy. Examples of types in this study include ''STATEMENT'', ''OPINION'', ''AGREEMENT/ACCEPT'', and ''YES-NO-QUESTION''. The research on dialog acts have increased since 1999, after spoken dialog systems became commercial reality.

References

Discourse analysis Oral communication Philosophy of language Pragmatics {{pragmatics-stub