Human/Human Conversation Understanding

While the term spoken language understanding mostly refers to the understanding of spoken utterances directed at machines, as they are more constrained, recent progress in recognition and understanding the human/human conversations and multi-party meetings is not negligible. While there is significant amount of previous work on discourse processing especially in social sciences (such as in the field of conversation analysis), processing human/human conversations is a relatively newer area for spoken language processing. In this chapter we focus on two-party and multi-party human/human conversation understanding approaches, mainly focusing on  discourse modeling, speech act modeling, and argument diagramming. We also try to point the bridge studies using human/human conversations for building better human/machine conversational systems or using the approaches for human/machine understanding for better human/human understanding and vice versa.