In this class, we’ll talk about “Dialog Acts”, starting with a paper that came out of a summer workshop at Johns Hopkins University in 1997, which became a standard in the industry. We’ll also read a paper of work that came out of this that considers multiple dimensions of dialog acts.
We’ll also start looking at data actually annotated with dialog acts, using the Penn Switchboard Treebank Discourse Relations data set. The Stolcke paper and the Switchboard data and annotation documentation are available on Latte.
There are a set of 5 unlabeled SWBD dialogs and the same 5 labeled. After reading the paper and the documentation, try to label some of the dialogs and then look at the official labeling. Be prepared to talk about what you find was hard or confusing.
For the next class: