Coding book:
available via ftp.cs.cmu.edu  in project/enthusiast/cstar/current/manual.ps
Author: not mentioned
Title: Template translation and Dialogue Act Annotation

Number of annotators:
5 (linguists, computational linguists, computer scientists)

Number of annotated dialogues:
 

Evaluation of scheme:
No inter-coder agreement tested.

Underlying task:
The scheme is developed for two-agent travel planning domain dialogues in which a travel agent and a customer are involved in various travel scenarios like hotel/flight reservation, ticket purchase, transportation inquiry, tour and sight seeing information seeking etc.. The dialogue act annotation scheme is designed for shallow representation of spoken utterances. The current inventory of dialogue acts is mainly based on hotel reservation dialogues, although the scheme is general enough to expand into other domains (i.e. scheduling).

List of phenomena annotated:
about 25 speech acts
about 500 domain-specific domain actions

Dialogue acts are compositional. A dialogue act consists of three representation levels indication different aspects of the utterance: the speech act (e.g. whether the speaker performs the act of accepting, giving a requesting information etc.), the concept which denote the informational focus of the utterance in question (i.e. whether the speaker is giving information about the availability of rooms, about a trip, a flight, etc.) and the arguments denoting the specific contents of the utterance (e.g. whether the speaker is giving information about single or double rooms, about one or two flights, etc.). Arguments are inherited either by the speech act or by the concepts.

Speech acts: accept, acknowledge, affirm, apologize, closing, give-information, greeting, introduce-self, introduce-topic, negate, offer, please-wait, reject, request-action, request-affirmation, request-information, request-suggestion, request-verification, suggest, suggest-action, thank, verify;

Some concepts: Actions (change, reservation, confirmation, cancellation, preference, help), Attributes (availability, size, temporal, price, location, features, etc.), Objects (room, hotel, flight, payment, etc.), Other (arrival, departure, numeral, expiration date);

Example:
The week of the twelfth we have both singles and doubles available.
a:give-information+availability+room (room-type=(single & double), time=(week, md12))

Mark-up language:
Interchange format

Existence of annotation tools:
No annotation tool.

Usability:
Used in the systems of the consortium members.

Contact person:

Lori Levin (Lori.Levin@alexis.boltz.cs.cmu.edu)

Last Modification: 27.8.1998 by Marion Klein