Dependency Dialogue Acts — Annotation Scheme and Case Study

Jon Cai, Brendan King, E. Margaret Perkoff, Shiran Dudy, Jie Cao, Marie Grace, Natalia Wojarnik, Ananya Ganesh, James H. Martin, Martha Palmer, Marilyn Walker, Jeffrey Flanigan

Abstract:

In this paper, we introduce Dependency Dialogue Acts (DDA), a novel
framework for capturing the structure of speaker-intentions in multi-party dialogues.
DDA combines and adapts features from existing dialogue annotation frameworks,
and emphasizes the multi-relational response structure of dialogues in addition to
the dialogue acts and rhetorical relations. It represents the functional, discourse,
and response structure in multi-party multi-threaded conversations. A few key
features distinguish DDA from existing dialogue annotation frameworks such as
SWBD-DAMSL and the ISO 24617-2 standard. First, DDA prioritizes the relational
structure of the dialogue units and the dialog context, annotating both dialog acts and
rhetorical relations as response relations to particular utterances. Second, DDA
embraces overloading in dialogues, encouraging annotators to specify multiple
response relations and dialog acts for each dialog unit. Lastly, DDA places an
emphasis on adequately capturing how a speaker is using the full dialog context to
plan and organize their speech. With these features, DDA is highly expressive and
recall-oriented with regard to conversation dynamics between multiple speakers. In
what follows, we present the DDA annotation framework and case studies annotating
DDA structures in multi-party, multi-threaded conversations.