Metrics for measuring domain independence of semantic classes

The design of dialogue systems for a new domain requires semantic classes (concepts) to be identified and defined. This process could be made easier by importing relevant concepts from previously studied domains to the new one. We propose two methodologies, based on comparison of semantic classes across domains, for determining which concepts are domain-independent, and which are specific to the new task. The concept-comparison technique uses a context-dependent Kullback-Leibler distance measurement to compare all pairwise combinations of semantic classes, one from each domain. The concept-projection method uses a similar metric to project a single semantic class from one domain into the lexical environment of another. Initial results show that both methods are good indicators of the degree of domain independence for a wide range of concepts, manually generated for three different tasks: Carmen (children’s game), Movie (information retrieval) and Travel (flight reservations).