Using Dialogue Corpora to Extend Information Extraction Patterns for Natural Language Understanding of Dialogue

This paper examines how Natural Language Process (NLP) resources and online dialogue corpora can be used to extend coverage of Information Extraction (IE) templates in a Spoken Dialogue system. IE templates are used as part of a Natural Language Understanding module for identifying meaning in a user utterance. The use of NLP tools in Dialogue systems is a difficult task given 1) spoken dialogue is often not well-formed and 2) there is a serious lack of dialogue data. In spite of that, we have devised a method for extending IE patterns using standard NLP tools and available dialogue corpora found on the web. In this paper, we explain our method which includes using a set of NLP modules developed using GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering), as well as a general purpose editing tool that we built to facilitate the IE rule creation process. Lastly, we present directions for future work in this area.