Deep Linguistic Processing with GETARUNS for Spoken Dialogue Understanding

In this paper we will present work carried out to scale up the system for text understanding called GETARUNS, and port it to be used in dialogue understanding. The current goal is that of extracting automatically argumentative information in order to build argumentative structure. The long term goal is using argumentative structure to produce automatic summarization of spoken dialogues. Very much like other deep linguistic processing systems, our system is a generic text/dialogue understanding system that can be used in connection with an ontology – WordNet - and other similar repositories of commonsense knowledge. We will present the adjustments we made in order to cope with transcribed spoken dialogues like those produced in the ICSI Berkeley project. In a final section we present preliminary evaluation of the system on two tasks: the task of automatic argumentative labeling and another frequently addressed task: referential vs. non-referential pronominal detection. Results obtained fair much higher than those reported in similar experiments with machine learning approaches.