The ISL meeting corpus - categorical features of communicative group interactions
Susanne Burger, Zachary A. Sloane · KITopen · 2004
Current research in human discourse structure has focused heavily on two-party dialogues to this point, and established several dialogue annotation schemata. This study examines whether the HCRC Dialogue Structure Coding Scheme (DSCS) [1] provides an appropriate tool to express structures of communicative group interactions in multiparty conversations. We examine a test set of multiparty meetings—recorded conversation sessions involving more than two speakers—using a derivative of DSCS, which was originally designed for two-speaker dialogue situations in a map task. DSCS provides a three-level system, which annotates communicative acts as discourse moves according to their discourse goals. It also captures the higher-level structure of dialogues as games and then combines games into transactions. This preliminary study examines five different meeting types defined in the ISL Meeting Corpus. The speech turns from each sample meeting are annotated as discourse moves, which in sequences comprise discourse games, using an adapted form of the DSCS. The initial results suggest that it is possible to adapt the DSCS scheme to multiparty conversations of different type to display the discourse dynamics. The data show that several distinct structural features exist in subsections of meetings and across different meeting types. Further, the results indicate that DSCS is useful for analyzing speaker involvement and participant hierarchies within a conversation. DSCS provides a means for discovering reoccurring patterns in meetings and isolating higher-level structures containing information units for discourse analysis and automatic recognition systems training.