Dialogue Act Coding and ModalitiesGSLT: Dialogue Systems
Leif Grönqvist – [email protected]
11. June 2002 15:30
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Presentation Outline
• Properties for dialogue act (in particular) coding schemes
• Mode – medium – modality
• Modality Theory
• The different coding schemes
• Some interesting differences between the coding schemes
• Conclusions
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Properties for dialogue act coding schemes
• How general is it?• Is it powerful enough for natural
dialogue?• Does the scheme handle different
modalities?• Are the definitions precise enough to
make the scheme useful in dialogue systems?
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More properties for coding schemes
• Multi functional codings
• Mutual exclusive categories
• Discontinuous codings
• Relational codings
• Hierarchical coding values
• Multi-layer scheme
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Mode – medium – modality
• Some terms are used in different ways in different contexts
• Bretan and Bernsen use “modality” in the same way but psychologists do not.
• B & B do not agree on the term “medium”• Bernsen: “We should aim for a
terminology that is robust, conceptually clear and intuitively accepted.”
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Modality Theory
• Niels Ole Bernsen’s theory: “A generative taxonomy of output modalities”
• Start with a set of basic features: Linguistic/non-linguistic(non-)analogue(non-)arbitrarystatic/dynamicgraphics/sound/touch
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Modality Theory 2
• Combine them to get 48 distinct types
• Remove impossible combinations: 20 left
• One more feature:
Real world/diagrammic/graphs
resulting in 28 distinct modalities
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• 28 unimodal modalities
• Use of more than one will result in multimodality
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Selected Coding Schemes for Dialogue Acts
• LINLIN 1/2: Linköping, Ahrenberg et al, 1995• HCRC: Developed for the Map Task Corpus,
Andersson et al 1991• DAMSL: By Discourse Resource Initiative as
a standardized coding scheme, 1991• SWBD-DAMSL: Modified DAMSL by Stolcke
et al 2000• GBG: Communicative Acts by Allwood 2000
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Why these
• They cover some different types
• And are developed for different purposes
• Some of them are widely spread and well known
• I know something about them
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Interesting differences
• LINLIN and DAMSL are more general than GBG and HCRC
• GBG and DAMSL are the more powerful• DAMSL and HCRC do not handle non-
verbal dialogue acts as well as LINLIN and GBG
• GBG is the only one not directly useful in dialogue systems
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Conclusions
• Some researchers does not seem to believe in non-verbal dialogue acts at all:
in SWBD-DAMSL the coding types are mutually exclusive and two of the most common are:
Backchannel/Acknowledge
Non-verbal
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More conclusions• The linguists scheme (GBG) is very rich
but not useful I a dialogue system context• Modality should not be used to define
dialogue act categories – but in a second layer.
• Our intuition says that a nod or pointing at something could be an answer to a question
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