Coding book:
http://stripe.Colorado.EDU/~jurafsky/manual.august1.html
Authors: Dan Jurafsky, Liz Shriberg, Debra Biasca
Title: Switchboard SWBD-DAMSL, Shallow-Discourse-Function Annotation; Coders Manual, Draft 13

Number of annotators:
9 (linguists)

Number of dialogues annotated:
1155 conversations / over 250 000 utterances / 1.4 million words

Evaluation of scheme:
0.80 < k < 0.84

Underlying task:
telephone conversation between strangers

List of phenomena annotated:

• Communicative-Status

• Uninterpretable (%):  But, uh, yeah.

• Non-verbal (x):  [Laughter]

• Abandoned or Turn-Exit (% -): So,-

• Self-talk (t1):  What's the world I'm looking for...

• 3rd-party-talk (t3):  My goodness, Diane, get down from there.

• Forward-Communicative-Function

• Statement

• Statement-non-opinion (sd): Me, I'm in the legal department.

• Statement-opinion (sv):  I think it's great.

• Influencing-addressee-future-action

• Yes-No-Question (qy):  Do you have to have any special training?

• Wh-Question (qw): Well, how old are you?

• Open-Question (qo):  How about you?

• Or-Clause (qrr):  Or is it more of a company?

• Declarative Yes-No-Question (qy^d): So you can afford to get a house?

• Declarative  Wh-Question (qw^d): You are what kind of buff?

• Tag-Question (^g):  Right?

• Action-directive (ad):  Why don't you go first?

• Backchannel in question form (bh): Is that right?

• Rhetorical-Questions (qh): Who would steal a newspaper?

• Committing-speaker-future-action

• Offers, Options Commits (oo,cc,co): I'll have to check that out.

• Other-forward-function

• Conventional-opening (fp): How are you?

• Conventional-closing (fc): Well, it's been nice talking to you.

• Thanking (ft):  Hey thanks a lot.

• Apology (fa):  I'm sorry.

• Backwards-Communicative-Function

• Agreement

• Agree/Accept (aa):  That's exactly it.

• Maybe/Accept-part (aap/am): Something like that.

• Reject (ar):  Well, no.

• Hold before answer/agreement (^h): I'm drawing a blank.

• Understanding

• Signal-non-understanding (br): Excuse me?

• Response Acknowledgement (bk): Oh, okay.

• Repeat-phase (b^m): Oh, fajitas.

• Collaborative Completion  (^2): Who aren't contributing?

• Acknowledge (b):  Uh-huh.

• Summarize/reformulate (bf): Oh, you mean you switched schools for the kids.

• Appreciation (ba):  I can imagine.

• Downplayer (bd):  That's all right.

• Answer

• Yes answers (ny):  Yes.

• No answers (nn):  No.

• Affirmative non-yes answers (na,ny^e): It is.

• Negative non-no answers (ng,nn^e): Uh, not a whole lot.

• Other answers (no):  I don't know.

• Dispreferred answers (arp,nd): Well, not so much that.

• Other

• Quotation (^q):  You can't be pregnant and have cats.

• Hedge (h):  I don't know if I'm making any sense or not.

Examples:
 

Mark-up language:
Variant of DAMSL

Existence of annotation tool:
None. Utterances are hand-labeled.

Usability:
Used for training stochastic discourse grammars so as to build better Language Models (LM) for Automatic  Speech Recognition (ASR) of Switchboard. A variant of SWBD-DAMSL is CLARIFY currently developed at the Carnegie Mellon University (Lori_Levin@alexis.boltz.cs.cmu.edu).

Contact person:
Daniel Jurafsky (jurafski@colorado.edu)

Last Modification: 27.8.1998 by Marion Klein