A Quantitative View of Short Utterances in Daily Conversation: A Case Study of Thats right, Thats true and Thats correct
Yanjiao Li, Alex Chengyu Fang, Jing Cao · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2014
Short utterances serve a multitude of different communicative functions in interactive speech and have attracted due attention in recent re-search in dialogue acts. This paper presents a quantitative description of three short utteranc-es i.e. that’s right, that’s true, that’s correct and their variations based on the Switchboard Dialogue Act Corpus. Particularly, it offers an overview to account for how they are deployed by native speakers in daily conversation. At the same time, it attempts to provide a comparative account of that’s right and that’s true, showing that while almost 75 % of them are mutually exchangeable, they nonetheless exhibit prefer-ences in interactive speech. This insight is ex-pected to form a useful approach towards automatic dialogue act tagging. 1