title: Detecting the start and end of dialog sections in prose
body: <p>I have looked through a lot of the open source NLP tools (OpenNLP primarily) and I do not see anything which automates the task of detecting the start and end of dialog.</p>
  
  <p>The sentence detection tools find the boundaries of the full sentence. The tokenizers accurately tokenize the punctuation, but still don't detect start and end. I've read many scholarly articles (<a href="http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P13-1129" rel="nofollow noreferrer">such as</a>) where dialog detection is assumed. But I don't see any tools which automate this as general purpose dialog detection.</p>
  
  <p>For instance, text like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"I am happy," she said.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Should have "I am happy," defined as dialog. Text like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"This is a really long piece of dialog spoken by a character.
  
  "That spans across multiple paragraphs."
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Should have the whole thing identified as dialog (even though the end of the first paragraph is missing the closing quotation mark). Also there are weirder ways of specifying dialog. Such as with dashes:</p>
  
  <pre><code>They were walking when Joe spoke up.
  --I really like walking.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Plus, often internal dialog will be denoted with italics, such as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Joe walked down the street. *I really hope I don't get hit by a bus.*
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there an NLP tool that can detect dialog sections like this? Or a way to do this with OpenNLP that I just missed?</p>