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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

For Mova

languages/en/31-speech-acts.md §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.

Library summary

The Research library's own summary of the paper, in our words — not the paper's text.

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — aclanthology.org/W17-7404.pdf

Summary

ISO 24617-2:2012, the international standard for dialogue act annotation, was due for its five-year review in 2017. The authors draw on practical annotation work, especially building the DialogBank gold-standard collection. From that experience they list the scheme's weaknesses and outline revisions.

The main error concerns feedback and speech-editing acts. Their antecedent can be any earlier stretch of speech, even a single word, and is not always a functional segment. The authors therefore propose adding non-functional "reference segments" to the segmentation. They also recommend extra dimensions and finer-grained communicative functions.

For rhetorical links, they suggest borrowing devices from the ISO DR-Core standard for discourse relations. This would let annotators mark argument roles and state whether a relation holds between acts or between their semantic contents. A new <semanticContent> element, combined with the <event> element found in other ISO schemes, could connect dialogue act markup with time, space and semantic role annotation.

Finally, tabular DiAML formats make manual correction much easier than XML. Together, the paper serves as a roadmap for revising the standard and making semantic annotation schemes interoperable.

Key points

  • The ISO 24617-2 scheme uses 9 dimensions (e.g., Task, Auto-/Allo-Feedback, Turn Management, Own/Partner Communication Management) and defines 56 communicative functions. Its markup language, DiAML, has an abstract syntax and an XML concrete syntax.

  • DBOX annotations in the DialogBank already depart from the standard by using non-functional segments for feedback dependences. The paper proposes making this practice official.

  • Experience with the DBOX and ADELE corpora motivates adding DAMSL's Task Management and DIT++'s Contact Management dimensions.

  • The proposed DR-Core imports address two gaps in rhetorical relation annotation: argument roles and the level at which a relation applies (act vs. semantic content).

  • Two tabular DiAML formats were defined and shown to be complete and unambiguous, and thus equivalent to DiAML-XML (Wijnhoven, 2016):

    • one column per dimension;
    • a single column with dimension labels.

    Converters between the formats are available in the DialogBank.

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

37 references, 1 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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