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Lexical, Prosodic, and Syntactic Cues for Dialog Acts

Summary

The paper examines how short feedback utterances in conversation, such as yeah, uh-huh and okay, can be told apart by their dialog act (DA) function. The acts studied are continuers, incipient speakership, agreements, yes-answers and assessments. The data come from the Switchboard (SWBD) corpus of telephone conversations, which was hand-annotated with the SWBD-DAMSL tagset, an adaptation of DAMSL. The authors compare which words realize each act, listen to recordings of selected utterances to find prosodic differences, and analyze the grammatical shape of assessments.

The word distributions differ clearly across acts, even though yeah is highly ambiguous. For some acts, prosody and timing settle cases the words leave open: duration, pitch, loudness, pauses, and whether one utterance runs straight into the next. Assessments follow a very narrow pattern, which leads the authors to propose a per-act "microsyntax". The work was a preliminary study within the WS97 Johns Hopkins project. It informs automatic DA recognition for speech recognition and understanding systems.

Key points

  • Annotation: Seven annotators tagged 1155 SWBD conversations (about 205,000 utterances) with SWBD-DAMSL.
    • The 220 tag combinations were later merged into 42 classes.
    • Inter-annotator agreement was 84% (kappa .80).
  • Continuers vs. floor-taking: Uh-huh is roughly twice as likely as yeah to act as a continuer. Yeah is about three times as likely to be used for taking the floor.
    • About 41% of backchannel yeah tokens take the floor.
    • About 11% of backchannel uh-huh tokens do so.
  • Yes-answers and agreements: 86% of yes-answers contain yes, yeah or yep. Uh-huh appears in only 4% of agreements, while exactly and that's right signal agreement unambiguously.
  • Prosody: Compared with agreements, continuers tend to be shorter, lower in pitch, flatter and quieter. A long pause before an utterance, or the absence of one ("latching"), can change how it is interpreted.
  • Assessments: Of 1150 assessments with an overt subject, 80% use that as the subject. Intensifiers occur in only 2% of cases (just really and pretty), and the adjectives come from a small closed set (great, good, nice, …).

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

27 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 24 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{jurafsky1998lexical,
  title = {{Lexical, Prosodic, and Syntactic Cues for Dialog Acts}},
  author = {Jurafsky, Daniel and Shriberg, Elizabeth and Fox, Barbara and Curl, Traci},
  booktitle = {Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers},
  year = {1998},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W98-0319/}
}

References

28 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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  3. J Carletta. 1996. Assessing agreement on classification tasks: The Kappa statistic. Computational Linguistics, 22(2):249-254. June. ↗ our card
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  14. D Jurafsky, E Shriberg, and D Biasca. 1997b. Switchboard SWBD-DAMSL Labeling Project Coder's Manual, Draft 13. Technical Report 97-02, University of Colorado Institute of Cognitive Science. Also available as http://stripe.colorado.edu/-jurafsky/manual.august 1 .html. ↗
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