Dialogue Acts Recognition - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 115

attention to what I am saying, will you” or “I am telling you I want to go to
Paris, not that I am looking for a promotional sale for my next vacation”. If the
overtone is hard to identify, the order intention is easier to infer, and we can
then consider this utterance as an example of an indirect act which can lead the
system to react by saying “I am listening” or “please restate your query”.
Compared to the example “this itinerary seems shorter”, it is, however,
possible in this case to answer the question at the same time with “yes, I am
listening” or “yes, please restate your query”. In other words, we can consider
that the question and the order happen simultaneously, which is a composite
act.
7.1.3. The issue with composite acts
Beyond the case in which an utterance both acknowledges the previous
utterance and the speech act carried by the linguistic form, the case of
composite acts is interesting as soon as a speech turn has various speech acts.
In some manner, this is the case for “hello, I would like to go to Paris” and
“OK, I will reserve a ticket”, because both utterances actually have two
discourse segments, and a speech act is allocated to each segment.
Determining speech acts thus comprises a priori segmentation of utterances.
This is especially the case for “how long with this itinerary which seems
shorter?”, which is interesting and falls under the composite act classification,
with an “asking” component, which is direct and concerns the journey time,
and another “asking” component, which is indirect and takes the shape of the
assertion “this itinerary seems shorter”. According to some authors, the first
component, that is the main component from the point of view of sentence
construction, is called the main act or act of first intent, while the second
component is called the subordinate act or act of second intent. As for the
indirect act, the assertion component, that is which matches the linguistic
form, is called the surface act or secondary act, while the querying
component, that is which is closed to the communication intention or at least
the act to which the system should react, is called the profound act or primary
act. Another example of the plethora of terms, [KER 12] also distinguishes
between the patent (literal, explicit and primitive) and the latent (indirect,
implicit and derived) values with various cases in which the real intention is
the latent value.