MATE Deliverable D1.1

Supported Coding Schemes

Condon and Cech's Coding Scheme
(Discourse Intervention Project, University of Southwestern Louisiana)

Coding Book:
sls-ftp.lcs.mit.edu/pub/multiparty/coding_schemes/condon
Author: Sherri Condon, Claude Cech
Title: Manual for Coding Decision-Making Interactions

Number of Annotators:
Five students, two undergraduate and three graduate students, were trained on the original scheme. One undergraduate did not achieve acceptable levels of agreement and did not code any dialogues. The other undergrad coded only a couple. Three graduate students have been trained on the new scheme and another is in progress. All students are non-linguists, although they may have had course work in linguistics.

Number of Annotated Dialogues:
First corpus (original coding scheme) contains 4141 utterances from the 16 face-to-face interactions and 918 utterances from the 16 computer-mediated interactions. The utterance is defined as a main clause together with all complements and adjuncts (including subordinate clauses). The new scheme has been used for 8 face-to-face and 60 synchronous computer-mediated interactions. In addition, we are working on about 20 asynchronous (e-mailed) computer-mediated interactions. The task for these interactions was to plan the MTV video awards ceremony, and participants were again dyads, but with all combinations of male and female.

Evaluation of scheme:
Evalution hasn't been performed yet but there has been a test at the discourse annotation workshop at Penn in which computational linguists whose only training was reading the manual were given Verbmobil data (as opposed to the planning tasks that the scheme was designed for) and achieved perfect agreement on 36 of 33 utterances.

Underlying task:
Decision-Making tasks

List of phenomena annotated:
Top-Level Functions:

Move (MOVE)
Response (RESP)
Other (OTHR)

Each utterance must be associated with exactly one function in each of the three broad categories.

Move Functions :

SA Suggests Action (for the decision task) locations, activities and orders for them

RA Requests Action (requires immediate action)

RV Request Validation/Verification/Acknowledgement (of some statement)

RI Requests Information (Information Questions)

ER Elaborates, Explains, Supports, Repeats previous utterance (Relevant comment)

NC No Clear MOVE function

Response Functions:

AS Agrees with Suggestion

DS Disagrees with Suggestion, Refuses to Comply with Request

CR Complies with Request

AO Acknowledges Only

NC No Clear RESPONSE Function

Other Functions:

DM Discourse Marker

ML Metalanguage

OS Orientation of Suggestion

PI Requests, Offers, Refers to, Evaluates Personal Information

JE Jokes, Exaggerates

NC No Clear OTHER Function

Examples:

Move Functions:

SA: Let's go to New Orleans

RA: Write that down

RV: right?, you know?, agreed?, To New Orleans? (checking questions)

RI: Where do you want to go?, How long does it take to drive to New Orleans?

ER: This is fun, I love New Orleans

NC: Fillers

Response Functions:

AS: ok, good idea, we should have a great time there

DS: no, sounds boring, that is too much in one day

CR: ok, it takes about an hour to drive to Baton Rouge

AO: me, too, really, I know

Other Functions:

DM: so, well, let's see

ML: Let's decide where the party will be first, We're finished

OS: To go to New Orleans, let's hire a jet, In New Orleans we can go on a riverboat

PI: Were you in the service?, Have you ever been there?, I go there all the time

JE: yeah/ mall warriors, party on!

Mark-up Language:
N.b's mark-up language. This is not fully compliant with SGML, but a program is distributed with Nb that converts Nb-annotated files into standard SGML files.

Existence of Annotation Tools:
N.b. Tcl/Tk interface by G. Flammia.

Usability:
Used in the Discourse Processing Project.

Contact person:
Sherri Condon (slc6859@usl.edu)
Department of English
University of Southwestern Louisiana
Lafayette, La 70504-4691
USA
Phone/Voice Mail (318) 482-5476 Fax (318) 482-5071

Last Modification: 27.8.1998 by Marion Klein