Socio-situational setting classification based on language use

We present a method for automatic classification of the socio-situational setting of a conversation based on the language used. The socio-situational setting depicts the social background of a conversation which involves the communicative goals, number of speakers, number of listeners and the relationship among the speakers and the listeners. Knowledge of the socio-situational setting can be used to search for content recorded in a particular setting or to select context-dependent models for example for speech recognition. We investigated the performance of different feature sets of conversation level features and word level features and their combinations on this task. Our final system, that classifies the conversations in the Spoken Dutch Corpus in one of 14 socio-situational settings, achieves an accuracy of 89.55%. © 2011 IEEE.