Coding book:
ftp://sls-ftp.lcs.mit.edu/pub/multiparty/coding_schemes/flammia
Author: Giovanni Flammia
Title: Instructions for Annotating
Segments in Dialogues
Number of annotators:
16 graduate students with some
knowledge of computer science and linguistics
Number of annotated dialogues:
25, with an average number of
dialogue turns of 40 and with 29 to 120 utterances per dialogue.
The language of the dialogues
is American-English.
Evaluations of scheme:
http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/~flammia/publications.html
List of phenomena annotated:
Structural/functional phenomena,
such as the division of dialogues into segments, each one concerning a
given topic. A segment is thus defined as a sequence of two or more dialogue
turns (including at least one utterance by each one of the speakers), where
one relevant piece of information is exchanged between conversation participants.
Relevance is defined in terms of necessity to the continuation of the task
defined in the dialogue. Flammia's coding scheme does not provide categories
with which segments should be annotated; instead, annotators are free to
choose what they consider to be the most appropriate description for a
given segment. However, some speech act tags that are exemplified in Flammia's
approach are the following: Request, Response, Acknowledge, Accept, Reject,
Repeat, Confirm, and Question Confirm. A decision procedure concerning
how to carve segments out of dialogues is specified, together with 'rules
of the thumb' regarding possible correspondences between surface forms
and segments boundaries. Discourse phenomena such as greetings, introductions,
offers to help, back-channel phenomena, prompts for continuation, thanks
and closings are not recognized as having a relevant status for segmentation.
Only segments directly dealing with task-relevant information are
signaled and annotated.
Examples:
http://sls-www.lcs.mit.edu/~flammia/Nb/example_output.gif
Mark-up language:
N.b.'s mark-up language. This
is not fully compliant with SGML, but a program is distributed with Nb
that converts Nb-annotated files into standard SGML files.
Existence of annotation tools:
N.b. Tcl/Tk interface by G.
Flammia.
Usability:
Information not available.
Contact person
Giovanni Flammia (flammia@sls.lcs.mit.edu)
Last Modification: 27.8.1998 by Marion Klein