Lexical Prosodic and Syntactics Cues for Dialog Acts Purpose Investigating the particular class of dialogue acts called backchannels aka acknowledgement tokens Those give feedback to the speaker Continuers an utterance indicating that the other speaker should go on speaking incipient speakership agreements marks the degree to which a user accepts the speakers opinion statement etc yes answers Assessments ascriptive sentences expression of a certain property good bad Questions Does it have any importance as cuephrases for the structure Does prosodic knowledge have any importance Is there any difference in syntactic realization of certain dialog acts compared to others Who Cares Part of a project to automate discourse structure for speech recognition and understanding tasks Create models of speakers and dialog Materials and Methods SWBD DAMSL dialog tagset an adaptation of DAMSL tag set 60 labels that could be combined in different dimensions 7 CU Boulder linguistics grad students labeling switchboard conversations of human to human interaction Results 220 unique tags for 205 000 utterances where each utterance received exactly one tag Good agreement rate between labelers 84 but too many tags for statistical analysis everything was condensed into 42 final tags On the lexical level do words like yeah have any importance as cue phrases for the structure Hirschberg Litman now and well Here words with overlap meanings Jurafsky s Findings utterances may be ambiguous BUT through the lexical form we could find the word s true identity Yeah Vs uh huh Yeah and variations ambiguous agreements at 36 at incipient speaker at 59 and 86 at yesanswers uh huh with its variations a continuer 45 vs yeah at 27 Next Question Does prosodic knowledge have any importance in determining DA s meaning Hirschberg and Litman intonational phrasing and pitch accent disambiguates cue phrases and help determine discourse structure Jurafsky agrees Runs experiment Text transcription vs complete speech MATERIALS AND METHODS 44 random but previously labeled conversations Conversations were put in full context as well as fully transcribed AND the original labeling was also available RESULTS 98 agreement 2 The shifts 38 of the 2 continuers agreements 19 of the 2 opinions statements 15 of the 2 statements opinions Etc Why the Shifts due to cascading changes continuer agreement preceding statement opinion Nature of labeling instruction ambiguous cases were labeled as continuers Identical lexical form some speakers distinguished agreement from continuer based on prosody while others used lexical form Take Home Message Continuers are in most cases vs agreements shorter in duration less intonationally marked long pauses before speaking 3rd Question Is there any difference in syntactic realization of certain dialog acts compared to others Goodwin and Goodwin Pro Term Copula Intensifier Assessment Adjective Formula happens frequently where pro term mostly equals that intensifiers are rare and are usually really and pretty assessment adjective has small range of adjectives great good nice wonderful etc Syntactic Conclusion micro syntax restricted grammatical production than would have thought That is certain dialog acts have their own syntactic patterning
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