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Towards an ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — aclanthology.org/L10-1385.pdf

Summary

Dialogue act annotation has long relied on many incompatible schemes, such as those from TRAINS, Map Task, Verbmobil and the DAMSL variants. Each was built for a particular domain, and they overlap in coverage while using inconsistent terminology. This paper presents the ISO project ISO 24617-2 (SemAF, Part 2: Dialogue acts), then at DIS stage, which aims at a single interoperable standard.

The proposal treats dialogue acts semantically, as operations that update the information states of addressees. Utterances are segmented into minimal functional segments rather than whole turns. A segment can carry several acts across distinct dimensions, such as task, feedback and turn management. Acts are linked to earlier material through functional and feedback dependence relations, and a metamodel ties these concepts together. The function inventory builds on DIT++ and the LIRICS project.

The paper also defines DiAML, a markup language with an abstract syntax, a formal semantics and an XML concrete syntax, designed to comply with LAF. The standard matters because it gives corpora and dialogue systems shared, precisely defined categories. It can also be extended or restricted to suit specific applications.

Key points

  • The core communicative functions derive from DIT++ and were defined as ISO 12620 data categories in LIRICS. They were tested on dialogues in English, Dutch and Italian.
  • General-purpose functions comprise 4 information-seeking, 6 information-providing, 4 commissive and 5 directive functions.
  • Dimension-specific functions cover several dimensions:
    • Feedback: auto-feedback (2) and allo-feedback (3).
    • Interaction control: time management (2), turn management (6) and discourse structuring (3).
    • Communication management: own (2) and partner (2).
    • Social obligation management (10).
  • Function qualifiers capture certainty, conditionality, partiality and emotion. For example, an indirect question can be annotated as a conditional request.
  • DiAML separates annotation from representation, following LAF, and uses ISO 24610-1 (TEI-ISO) for attaching annotations to data.

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: Speech act theory

Cited by

70 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 6 of them have a page here, 64 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{bunt2010iso,
  title = {{Towards an ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation}},
  author = {Bunt, Harry and Alexandersson, Jan and Carletta, Jean and Choe, Jae-Woong and Fang, Alex Chengyu and Hasida, Koiti and Lee, Kiyong and Petukhova, Volha and Popescu-Belis, Andrei and Romary, Laurent and Soria, Claudia and Traum, David},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.63317/5jv9phvv5iwc},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5jv9phvv5iwc}
}

References

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