1. Dialogue Act Coding and Modalities GSLT: Dialogue Systems Leif Grönqvist – leifg@ling.gu.se 11. June 2002 15:30

2. 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 Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

3. 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? Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

4. More properties for coding schemes • Multi functional codings • Mutual exclusive categories • Discontinuous codings • Relational codings • Hierarchical coding values • Multi-layer scheme Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

5. 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.” Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

6. 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-)arbitrary static/dynamic graphics/sound/touch Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

7. 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 Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

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10. 28 unimodal modalities • Use of more than one will result in multimodality Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

11. 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 Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

12. 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 Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

13. 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 Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

14. 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 Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

15. 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 Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist

16. We are done And probably out of time Dialogue Systems: Leif Grönqvist