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
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•
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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.