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A Context-Change Semantics for Dialogue Acts

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Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 47))

Abstract

This chapter presents an update semantic for dialogue acts, defined in terms of combinations of ‘elementary update functions’. This approach allows fine-grained distinctions to be made between related types of dialogue acts, and relations like entailment and exclusion between dialogue acts to be established. The approach is applied to the inventory of dialogue act types in the DIT++ taxonomy, using dialogue act representations as defined in the Dialogue Act Markup Language (DiAML), which is part of the recently established ISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ISO 24612:2012; see also Ide and Romary (2004).

  2. 2.

    If the set E in a dependence structure Δ=〈E,δ〉 is empty, then this amounts to there being no dependences. We will designate a dependence structure Δ=〈∅,δ〉 by ∅.

  3. 3.

    http://corpus.amiproject.org

  4. 4.

    See Bunt (2010) for formal definitions and proofs relating to alternative representation formats sharing the same abstract syntax, and Bunt (2013a) for a procedure to derive a concrete syntax from an abstract syntax.

  5. 5.

    This approach has been implemented in the multimodal DenK dialogue system; see Kievit et al. (2001).

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Acknowledgements

I thank the members of the Tilburg Dialogue Club, who over the years have contributed to shaping Dynamic Interpretation Theory and the DIT++ annotation scheme, as well as PhD students and colleagues in related projects. This includes Volha Petukhova, Jeroen Geertzen, Simon Keizer, Roser Morante, Amanda Schiffrin, Ielka van der Sluis, Hans van Dam, Yann Girard, Rintse van der Weff, Elyon Dekoven, Paul Piwek, Robbert-Jan Beun, René Ahn, and Leen Kievit. Important contributions have also come from collaborative work in relation to ISO project 24617-2 “Semantic Annotation Framework, Part 2: Dialogue Acts”, in particular with David Traum, Jan Alexandersson, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Laurent Prévot, Marcin Wlodarzcak, Jens Allwood, Jean Carletta, Jae-Woong Choe, Alex Fang, Kiyong Lee, Laurent Romary, Nancy Ide, Claudia Soria, Dirk Heylen, and David Novick.

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Correspondence to Harry Bunt .

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Appendix: The DIT++/ISO 24617-2 Taxonomies of Communicative Functions

Appendix: The DIT++/ISO 24617-2 Taxonomies of Communicative Functions

Fig. 1
figure 1

General-purpose communicative functions in ISO 24617-2 and DIT++

Fig. 2
figure 2

Dimension-specific communicative functions in ISO 24617-2 and DIT++. Functions and dimensions in italics are defined only in DIT++

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Bunt, H. (2014). A Context-Change Semantics for Dialogue Acts. In: Bunt, H., Bos, J., Pulman, S. (eds) Computing Meaning. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7284-7_10

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