Revisiting the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation

What it is about

A position paper written before the five-year review of ISO 24617-2 (2012), drawing on the building of the DialogBank. It summarises the scheme (nine orthogonal dimensions, 56 communicative functions, qualifiers, dependence and rhetorical relations; a dialogue act as a tuple of sender, addressees, function, content, dimension and relations) and lists its faults. Feedback such as «Tuesday?» or «John WHO?» is about a single word, not a functional segment, so non-functional "reference segments" are needed. It gives a three-step rule for dependence: a responsive function (Answer, Confirm, Disconfirm, Agreement, Disagreement, Correction, Accept/Address/Reject Request, Suggest, Offer) gets a functional dependence on the eliciting act; a feedback-specific function gets a feedback dependence; nothing else gets one. Rhetorical relations need argument roles (reason/result) and must say whether they hold between contents or between acts («He didn't come in. He has the flu.» vs «…He sent me a message saying he has the flu.»). It also proposes Task Management and Contact Management dimensions and tabular, one-column-per-dimension formats that annotators found far easier to check than XML.

Ideas

• I1. Split Mova's agree/disagree by what they respond to, using the paper's list of responsive functions: a reply to a request or offer is an acceptance or refusal («No, I won't»), a reply to an assertion is agreement or disagreement, a reply to a yes/no question is confirm/disconfirm. In prag/src/feats.rs add a slot «act of the previous utterance by another speaker» (the existing prev is just the previous sentence). Measure agree/disagree and request recall in prag eval; k-NN now finds 0 and 2 of them.
• I2. Implement the three-step dependence rule literally as a deterministic function over Mova's acts (responsive → link to the nearest earlier eliciting act of another voice; else none), and use it as a gold-free check: a disagree with no eliciting act before it in the paragraph is a suspicious label to send to the teacher. Measure how many silver labels it flags and how many the teacher changes.
• I3. Allow several functions per utterance in the frame reader, one per dimension, the way «hello, can I help you» is Greeting + Offer. Tale lines like «Good morning, will you lend me your axe?» would keep both greet and request. A first, cheap version: a second act slot filled only by Social Obligations cues from prag/data/cues.tsv. Measure: how many silver sentences with greet/thank/apologize cues carry another act.
• I4. Print prag decisions in the paper's multi-column table (segment, speaker, one column per dimension, dependence in brackets) as a human view next to the TSV; it is the format that made errors visible for the DialogBank annotators.

For Mova

31. Speech acts §7.2–7.3 and §10 (no multidimensional acts yet), 38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers.md §9–10 (questions and answers in dialogue). Code: prag/src/feats.rs (other-speaker previous act), prag/src/schema.rs, prag/src/frames.rs (dependence link), prag/data/cues.tsv. Measures: prag eval per-act F1 for agree, disagree, request; number of flagged silver labels.

Topics: Speech act theory

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22028/d291-29411

@inproceedings{bunt2017revisiting,
  title = {{Revisiting the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation}},
  author = {Bunt, Harry and Petukhova, Volha and Fang, Alex Chengyu},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-13)},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.22028/d291-29411},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22028/d291-29411}
}

References

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