Automatically Generated Prosodic Cues to Lexically Ambiguous Dialog Acts in Multiparty Meetings

We investigate whether automatically extracted prosodic features can serve as cues to dialog acts (DAs) in naturallyoccurring meetings. We focus on the classification of four short DAs, all of which can be conveyed by the same words. DAs were hand-labeled based on the discourse context. Results for classifiers trained on automatically extracted prosodic features show significant associations with DAs in unseen test data. Furthermore, the specific features used depend on the classification task at hand. Results shed light on the relationship between discourse function and prosody, and could be used to aid automatic processing for natural dialog understanding.