Discourse Structure and Dialogue Acts in Multiparty Dialogue: the STAC Corpus

What it is about

STAC is a corpus of chats from online games of The Settlers of Catan (36 games fully annotated in this release), in which players bargain for resources while competing, so they sometimes withhold information or mislead («anyone got some ore?» – «nope sorry» from a player holding two). The chats are messy (creative nouns, verb ellipsis such as «I can wheat for clay») and full of interleaved threads, and many moves only make sense against game events that nobody describes in words: a player steals a card, the victim answers «touché», «it» refers to the stolen resource. Annotation follows SDRT in two layers: dialogue acts (offers, counteroffers, acceptances, refusals), then discourse units linked by typed relations into a graph, not a tree, with complex units built from smaller ones. Graphs are needed because one move can attach to several earlier ones (a single «kk» acknowledges three refusals). The commonest relations are question–answer pair, question elaboration and acknowledgement; correction of an earlier move, rare in text schemes, is frequent.

Ideas

• I1. Link a social act to the event it reacts to: a thank Say frame to the preceding giving or helping Event, an apologize to the harm, a «touché»-like express to the action just done to the speaker. In tales this lets the reader answer «Why did the girl thank the old woman?» from the event, which a Say frame alone cannot. A rule in prag/src/frames.rs (the nearest earlier Event whose agent is the addressee and whose patient or recipient is the speaker); measure with world knowledge diagnose on why-questions about speech.
• I2. Add a correction link between frames: «No, it was the hare who won» corrects an earlier claim; the SLM student should then remember the corrected version and mark the old one as replaced. Detect it from a reply cue (no, not … but) plus the same predicate with a different role filler; test with minimal pairs in course-style lessons.
• I3. Allow one reply to depend on several earlier lines (an acknowledgement or a summary answer to many questions) instead of exactly one, when the dependence link proposed under bunt-2020-iso-standard-dialogue-act-annotation I1 is built.
• I4. Keep strategic speech in mind for the student: characters in tales also lie or withhold (the wolf at the door). A claim's truth is its principal's commitment until the story confirms it (see faller-2019-discourse-commitments-illocutionary-reportatives I1).

For Mova

36. Discourse relations and coherence §5 (SDRT) and §11, 38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers.md §8–11. Code: prag/src/frames.rs (reaction and correction links), world/src/knowledge.rs (student memory). Measures: diagnosis of why-questions about speech; minimal-pair tests for corrections.

Topics: Discourse analysis · Speech act theory

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3dr9b3ndpn84

@inproceedings{asher2016discourse,
  title = {{Discourse Structure and Dialogue Acts in Multiparty Dialogue: the STAC Corpus}},
  author = {Asher, Nicholas and Hunter, Julie and Morey, Mathieu and Benamara, Farah and Afantenos, Stergos},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/3dr9b3ndpn84},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3dr9b3ndpn84}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/asher-2016-discourse-structure-dialogue-acts-multiparty/