Classifying Sentences as Speech Acts in Message Board Posts

This research studies the text genre of message board forums, which contain a mixture of expository sentences that present factual information and conversational sentences that include communicative acts between the writer and readers. Our goal is to create sentence classifiers that can identify whether a sentence contains a speech act, and can recognize sentences containing four different speech act classes: Commissives, Directives, Expressives, and Representatives. We conduct experiments using a wide variety of features, including lexical and syntactic features, speech act word lists from external resources, and domain-specific semantic class features. We evaluate our results on a collection of message board posts in the domain of veterinary medicine.