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Annotation of Discourse Relations for Conversational Spoken Dialogs

Summary

The paper examines how discourse relations work in spontaneous spoken Italian. It tests whether the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) framework, designed for written English news, can be used for conversational dialogs. The authors annotated 60 human-human help-desk conversations from the LUNA corpus. This adds a discourse layer on top of LUNA's existing annotations for domain attributes, dialog acts and FrameNet-style predicate-argument structures.

Several changes to PDTB were needed:

  • Non-adjacent arguments: implicit relations may link spans that are not next to each other, because speech is full of interruptions and disfluencies.
  • New relation label: an Interruption label covers cases where a speaker is cut off after producing only one argument.
  • Revised sense hierarchy: the hierarchy was reworked to capture pragmatic functions, such as separating a word used as a turn-taking marker from the same word used as a real connective.

Corpus statistics show that sense and connective frequencies differ from those in PDTB. Temporal and causal relations dominate, reflecting troubleshooting talk. This was the first application of PDTB to Italian and to spontaneous dialog, which matters for dialog management and other discourse-aware spoken-language systems.

Key points

  • LUNA corpus: 1000 Italian dialogs collected at the help-desk of the Piedmont Region's information systems consortium, split evenly between Human-Human and Human-Machine (Wizard of Oz) conversations. Only 60 HH dialogs received discourse annotation.
  • Relation types: the PDTB types (Explicit, Implicit, AltLex, EntRel) were kept, and a new Interruption label was added.
  • Argument selection: the minimality principle and the strict two-argument rule (Arg1/Arg2) were retained. The adjacency constraint on implicit relations was dropped.
  • Connective ambiguity: words like "allora" (so) can act either as a discourse marker or as a true connective, which motivated the pragmatics-oriented sense revisions.
  • Sense distribution: Temporal.Asynchronous and causal senses rank much higher in LUNA than in PDTB, which the authors attribute to task-oriented troubleshooting dialogs. Annotating attribution is planned as future work.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

41 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 15 of them have a page here, 26 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{tonelli2010annotation,
  title = {{Annotation of Discourse Relations for Conversational Spoken Dialogs}},
  author = {Tonelli, Sara and Riccardi, Giuseppe and Prasad, Rashmi and Joshi, Aravind},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.63317/2xr8r3kns22r},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2xr8r3kns22r}
}

References

18 references, 6 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  3. M. Dinarelli, S. Quarteroni, S. Tonelli, A. Moschitti, and G. Riccardi. 2009. Annotating Spoken Dialogs: from Speech Segments to Dialog Acts and Frame Semantics. In EACL Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language, Athens, Greece. find our card
  4. M. P. Marcus, B. Santorini, and M. A. Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: the Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics, 19(2):313–330. find our card
  5. Lucie Mladová, Šárka Zikánová, and Eva Hajičová. 2008. From Sentence to Discourse: Building an Annotation Scheme for Discourse Based on Prague Dependency Treebank. In Proceedings of the 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Marrakech, Morocco. find
  6. U. Oza, R. Prasad, S. Kolachina, D. M. Sharma, and A. Joshi. 2009. The Hindi Discourse Relation Bank. In Proceedings of the Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop, Suntec, Singapore. find our card
  7. Silvia Pareti and Irina Prodanof. 2010. Annotating Attribution Relations: Towards an Italian Discourse Treebank. To appear in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. find
  8. Silvia Pareti. 2009. Towards a discourse resource for Italian: developing an annotation schema for attribution. Master’s thesis, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, University of Pavia, Italy. find
  9. R. Prasad, N. Dinesh, A. Lee, A. Joshi, and B. Webber. 2007. Attribution and its annotation in the Penn Discourse TreeBank. Traitement Automatique des Langues, Special Issue on Computational Approaches to Document and Discourse, 47(2). find
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  11. Silvia Quarteroni, Giuseppe Riccardi, Sebastian Varges, and Arianna Bisazza. 2008. An Open-Domain Dialog Act Taxonomy. Technical Report DISI-08-032, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento. find
  12. PDTB-Group. 2009. The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 Annotation Manual. Technical Report IRCS-08-01, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania. Available online at http://www.seas.upenn.edu/pdtb/PDTBAPI/pdtb-annotation-manual.pdf. ↗
  13. Deborah Schiffrin. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. find
  14. E. Sweetser. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge University Press. find
  15. Sara Tonelli and Giuseppe Riccardi. 2010. Guidelines for Annotating the LUNA corpus with Frame Information. Technical Report DISI-10-017, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento. find
  16. Janyce Wiebe. 2002. Instructions for annotating opinions in newspaper articles. Technical Report TR-02-101, Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh. find
  17. Nianwen Xue. 2005. Annotating Discourse Connectives in the Chinese Treebank. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky. find our card
  18. Deniz Zeyrek and Bonnie Webber. 2008. A Discourse Resource for Turkish: Annotating Discourse Connectives in the METU Corpus. In Proceedings of IJCNLP. find our card

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