2004 Volume 11 Issue 2 Pages 21-66
We aim to extract intentions from open-ended questionnaires. Intentions includerequest, complaint, resignation and so forth. We focus on extracting request intentionsthis time. To extract intentions, we first have to judge reliably whether a givenresponse does contain a request intention or not. Therefore, as a first step, we havedeveloped a criterion for judging the existence of request intentions in responses. The criterion, which is based on paraphrasing, is described in detail in this paper. Our assumption is that a response with request intentions can be paraphrased intoa typical request expression, e. g., “I would like to…, ” while responses withoutrequest are not paraphrasable. The criterion is evaluated in terms of objectivity, reproducibility and effectiveness. Objectivity is demonstrated by showing that machinelearning methods can learn the criterion from a set of intention-tagged data, while reproducibility, that the judgments of three annotators are reasonably consistent, and effectiveness, that judgments based not on the criterion but on intuitiondo not agree. This means the criterion is necessary to achieve reproducibility. Theseexperiments indicate that the criterion can be used to judge the existence of requestintentions in responses reliably.
