Any questions? Automatic question detection in meetings

Abstract

In this paper, we describe our efforts toward the automatic detection of English questions in meetings. We analyze the utility of various features for this task, originating from three distinct classes: lexico-syntactic, turn-related, and pitch-related. Of particular interest is the use of parse tree information in classification, an approach as yet unexplored. Results from experiments on the ICSI MRDA corpus demonstrate that lexico-syntactic features are most useful for this task, with turn-and pitch-related features providing complementary information in combination. In addition, experiments using reference parse trees on the broadcast conversation portion of the OntoNotes release 2.9 data set illustrate the potential of parse trees to outperform word lexical features.