Guidelines for using ISO standard 24617-2
Harry Bunt · Tilburg University Research Portal · 2019
OverviewThis document provides practical information for using the ISO 24617-2 standard for dialogue annotation.The document is organized as follows.Section 1 discusses some general issues in dialogue act annotation.Section 2 explains the segmentation of a dialogue into the segments of communicative behaviour that express a dialogue act (possibly more than one).Section 3 shows the ISO 24617-2 metamodel and the corresponding components of an ISO 24617-2 annotation.The sections 4-7 contain guidelines for applying the concepts of the ISO 24617-2 metamodel: dimensions, communicative functions, qualifiers, functional dependences, feedback dependences, and rhetorical relations.Section 8 introduces the use of alternative representation formats of ISO 24617-2 annotations in the Dialogue Act Markup Language (DiAML) as developed for the DialogBank, which is introduced in Section 9. Section 10 discusses the possibilities for customizing the ISO 24617-2 annotation scheme to specific domains and purposes.Section 11, finally discusses the limitations of the current version of ISO 24617-2, and possible revisions in a future version.The document ends with a list of references, an appendix that contains summary definitions of the dimensions, communicative functions, and qualifiers of ISO 24617-2, and an appendix that contains summary definitions of the core set of rhetorical relations specified in the ISO 24617-8 standard for the annotations of discourse relations, which are recommended for use also in dialogue annotation. General issues in DA annotation 1.PreliminariesA dialogue has been defined as "a spoken, typed or written interaction in natural language between two or more agents" (DAMSL Revised Manual, p. 1).The term 'agent' in this characterization is intended to cover both human and artificial participants.The ISO 24617-2 standard is intended to apply to dialogues in a wider sense, where the participants not only use natural language but also nonverbal means, such as gestures and facial expressions, in the case of human participants and embodied conversational agents, and means like highlighting, blinking, and beeping in the case of interactive computer systems such as virtual assistants and helpdesks.The prototypical setting of human dialogue is that of face-to-face communication, where speech is combined with other vocal sounds (laughs, sighs, heavy breathing, etc.), facial expressions, gaze direction, and other physical activities including head-, hand-, arm-, and shoulder gestures, forms of touching (stroking, caressing, hugging, shaking hands, patting on the shoulder, etc.), and body posture changes.All these verbal and nonverbal activities may have a communicative meaning which can be made explicit in terms of dialogue acts.ISO 24617-2 has a general emphasis on its use for creating interoperable language resources, but it has been successfully applied also to nonverbal and multimodal behaviours. Dialogue settings and participantsDialogue act annotation schemes have been developed mostly for situations involving two people in a spoken interaction, with or without visual contact, or involving several people in a setting where they see and hear each other.In either type of situation there is much of the time one participant who occupies the speaker role, i.e. "has temporary control of the dialogue and speaks for some period of time" (DAMSL Revised Manual, Preliminaries, p. 1).This participant, the 'speaker', speaks either to the single other