Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-wq2xx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T12:07:14.068Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

DialogueView: annotating dialogues in multiple views with abstraction†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2008

FAN YANG ,
PETER A. HEEMAN ,
KRISTY HOLLINGSHEAD  and
SUSAN E. STRAYER
FAN YANG
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
PETER A. HEEMAN
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
KRISTY HOLLINGSHEAD
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
SUSAN E. STRAYER
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper describes DialogueView, a tool for annotating dialogues with utterance boundaries, speech repairs, speech act tags, and hierarchical discourse blocks. The tool provides three views of a dialogue: WordView, which shows the transcribed words time-aligned with the audio signal; UtteranceView, which shows the dialogue line-by-line as if it were a script for a movie; and BlockView, which shows an outline of the dialogue. The different views provide different abstractions of what is occurring in the dialogue. Abstraction helps users focus on what is important for different annotation tasks. For example, for annotating speech repairs, utterance boundaries, and overlapping and abandoned utterances, the tool provides the exact timing information. For coding speech act tags and hierarchical discourse structure, a broader context is created by hiding such low-level details, which can still be accessed if needed. We find that the different abstractions allow users to annotate dialogues more quickly without sacrificing accuracy. The tool can be configured to meet the requirements of a variety of annotation schemes.

Type
Papers
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 3 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, J. F. and Core, M. G. (1997) DAMSL: Dialog annotation markup in several layers. Unpublished Manuscript.Google Scholar
Barras, C., Geoffrois, E., Wu, Z. and Liberman, M. (2001) Transcriber: Development and use of a tool for assisting speech corpora production. Speech Communication, 33 (1–2): 5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beach, C. M. (1991) The interpretation of prosodic patterns at points of syntactic structure ambiguity: Evidence for cue trading relations. Journal of Memory and Language, 30 (6): 644–663.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernsen, N. O., Dybkœr, L. and Kolodnytsky, M. (2003) An interface for annotating natural interactivity. In: Kuppevelt, J. Van and Smith, R. W., editors, Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue. Kluwer, Chapter 3, pp. 35–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bird, S., Day, D., Carofolo, J., Henderson, J., Laprun, C. and Liberman, M. (2000) ATLAS: A flexible and extensible architecture for linguistic annotation. Proceedings of 2nd LREC, pp. 1699–1706, Greece.Google Scholar
Bird, S., Maeda, K., Ma, X. and Lee, H. (2001) Annotation tools based on the annotation graph API. Proceedings of ACL/EACL 2001 Workshop on Sharing Tools and Resources for Research and Education, France.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (2005) Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. Technical report, Institute of Phonetics Sciences of the University of Amsterdam, March. http://www.praat.org.Google Scholar
Carberry, S. and Lambert, L. (1999) A process model for recognizaing communicative acts and modeling negotiation subdialogues. Computational Linguistics, 25 (1): 1–53.Google Scholar
Carletta, J., Evert, S., Heid, U., Kilgour, J., Robertson, J. and Voormann, H. (2003) The NITE XML toolkit: Flexible annotation for multi-modal language data. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, pp. 353–363. Special Issue on Measuring Behavior.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carletta, J., Isard, A., Isard, S., Kowtko, J. C., Doherty-Sneddon, G. and Anderson, A. H. (1997) The reliability of a dialogue structure coding scheme. Computational Linguistics, 23 (1): 13–31.Google Scholar
Cassidy, S. and Harrington, J. (2001) Multi-level annotation in the Emu speech database management system. Speech Communication, 33: 61–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Core, M. G. and Allen, J. F. (1997) Coding dialogues with the DAMSL annotation scheme. Working Notes: AAAI Fall Symposium on Communicative Action in Humans and Machines, pp. 28–35, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Flammia, G. (1998) Discourse Segmentation of Spoken Dialogue: An Empirical Approach. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Grosz, B. J. and Sidner, C. L. (1986) Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12 (3): 175–204.Google Scholar
Hagen, E. (1999) An approach to mixed initiative spoken information retrieval dialogue. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction, 9: 167–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, P., Abney, S., Fleckenger, D., Gdaniec, C., Grishman, R., Hindle, D., Ingria, B., Marcus, M., Santorini, B. and Strzalkowski, T. (1991) Evaluating syntax performance of parser/grammars of English. Proceedings of the Workshop on Evaluating Natural Language Processing Systems, 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 71–77, Berkely CA.Google Scholar
Heeman, P. A. and Allen, J. F. (1995a) Dialogue transcription tools. Trains Technical Note 94-1, URCS, March. Revised.Google Scholar
Heeman, P. A. and Allen, J. F. (1995b) The Trains spoken dialogue corpus. CD-ROM, Linguistics Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Heeman, P. A. and Allen, J. F. (1999) Speech repairs, intonational phrases and discourse markers: Modeling speakers' utterances in spoken dialogue. Computational Linguistics, 25 (4): 527–571.Google Scholar
Heeman, P. A., Yang, F., Kun, A. L. and Shyrokov, A. (2005) Conventions in human-human multithreaded dialogues: A preliminary study. Proceedings of Intelligent User Interface (short paper session), pp. 293–295, San Diego CA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heeman, P. A., Yang, F. and Strayer, S. E. (2002) DialogueView: A dialogue annotation tool. Proceedings of 3rd SIGdial workshop on Dialogue and Discourse, pp. 50–59, Philadelphia PA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jönsson, A. and Dahlbäck, N. (2000) Distilling dialogues – a method using natural dialogue corpora for dialogue systems development. Proceedings of 6th Applied Natural Language Processing Conference, pp. 44–51, Seattle WA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kipp, M. (2001) Anvil: A generic annotation tool for multimodal dialogue. Proceedings of 7th Eurospeech, pp. 1367–1370, Denmark.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linell, P. (1998) Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspective. John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000) The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Third edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mann, W. C. and Thompson, S. A. (1987) Rhetorical structure theory: A theory of text organisation. In: Polanyi, L., editor, The Structure of Discourse. Ablex Norwood.Google Scholar
McKelvie, D., Isard, A., Mengel, A., Moeller, M., Grosse, M. and Klein, M. (2001) The MATE Workbench – An annotation tool for XML coded speech corpora. Speech Communication, 33 (1–2): 97–112. Special Issue: Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, C. and Strube, M. (2003) Multi-level annotation in MMAX. Proceedings of 4th SIGDIAL, Sapporo Japan.Google Scholar
Pitrelli, J. F., Beckman, M. E. and Hirschberg, J. (1994) Evaluation of prosodic transcription labeling reliability in the ToBI framework. Proceedings of 3rd ICSLP, pp. 123–126, Japan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, L. (1988) A formal model of the structure of discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 12: 601–638.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramshaw, L. A. (1991) A three-level model for plan exploration. Proceedings of 29th ACL, pp. 36–46, Berkeley CA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reichman-Adar, R. (1984) Extended person-machine interface. Artificial Intelligence, 22 (2):157–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, C. P., DiEugenio, B. Eugenio, B., Levin, L. S. and Van Ess-Dykema, C. (1995) Discourse processing of dialogues with multiple threads. Proceedings of 33rd ACL, pp. 31–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schober, M. F. and Clark, H. H. (1989) Understanding by addresses and overhearers. Cognitive Science, 21: 211–232.Google Scholar
Sjölander, K. and Beskow, J. (2000) WaveSurfer: An open source speech tool. Proceedings of ICSLP, pp. 464–467, Beijing China.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strayer, S. E., Heeman, P. A. and Yang, F. (2003) Reconciling control and discourse structure. In: Kuppevelt, J. Van and Smith, R. W., editors, Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue. Kluwer Academic, Chapter 14, pp. 305–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, S., Cole, R., de Villiers, J., Schalkwyk, J., Vermeulen, P., Macon, M., Yan, Y., Kaiser, E., Rundle, B., Shobaki, K., Hosom, P., Kain, A., Wouters, J., Massaro, D. and Cohen, M. (1998) Universal speech tools: The CSLU toolkit. Proceedings of 5th ICSLP, pp. 3221–3224, Australia.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traum, D. R. and Hinkelman, E. A. (1992) Conversation acts in task-oriented spoken dialogue. Computational Intelligence, 8 (3): 575–599. Special Issue: Computational Approaches to Non-Literal Language.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traum, D. R. and Nakatani, C. H. (1999) A two-level approach to coding dialogue for discourse structure: Activities of the 1998 working group on higher-level structures. Proceedings of the ACL'99 workshop Towards Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging, pp. 101–108, College Park MD.Google Scholar
Yang, F., Heeman, P. A. and Strayer, S. E. (2003) Acoustically verifying speech repair annotation. Proceedings of DISS'03, pp. 95–98, Sweden.Google Scholar
Yang, F., Heeman, P. A. and Strayer, S. E. (2004) Evaluation of “clean display” in DialogueView. Technical Report CSLU-04-001, Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, June.Google Scholar
Yang, F., Strayer, S. E. and Heeman, P. A. (2002) ACT: A graphical dialogue annotation comparison tool. Proceedings of 7th ICSLP, pp. 1553–1556, Denver CO.CrossRefGoogle Scholar