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Proceedings of the 
I st SIGdial Workshop on 
Discourse and Dialogue 
Held in conjunction with 
The 38th Annual Meeting of the 
Association for Computational Linguistics 
Edited by 
Laila Dybkja~r 
Koiti Hasida 
and 
David Traum 
7-8 October 2000 
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) 
Hong Kong 
Proceedings of the 
1 st SIGdial Workshop on 
Discourse and Dialogue 
Held in conjunction with 
The 38th Annual Meeting of the 
Association for Computational Linguistics 
Edited by 
Laila Dybkja~r 
Koiti Hasida 
and 
David Traum 
7-8 October 2000 
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) 
Hong Kong .... 
? 
© 2000, Association for Computational Linguistics 
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Preface 
Welcome to the 1 st SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue. SIGdial is the ACL 
Special Interest Group in Discourse and Dialogue which was formed in late 1997. With the 
increasing importance of our area of research there has been a perceived need in the SIGdial 
Community for a regular workshop spanning the entire field of discourse and dialogue. While 
there has been a lot of activity in the field, and fairly ffrequent workshops on various sub- 
topics, there has not been a regular place for presentation of discourse and dialogue research 
to receive attention from the larger SIGdial community. This workshop is intended to be the 
first in a regular series which serves to bring the SIGdial community together. 
Topics for this workshop include formal, corpus-based, implementational and analytical work 
on discourse and dialogue, with a focus on the following three themes: 
• Dialogue Systems, i.e. models, methods, strategies, tools and architectures related to 
spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems. 
• Corpora and Corpus Tools, i.e. support for corpus-based work on discourse and dialogue. 
• Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modelling, i.e. the pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse 
and dialogue (beyond a single sentence), and specific aspects of discourse and dialogue 
structure. 
In addition to these three themes, this year's workshop includes a special-theme session on 
• Principles for Evaluation of Dialogue Systems. 
We would like to thank the members of the Program Cornrnittee- Niels Ole Bemsen, Phil 
Cohen, Morena Danieli, Yasuharu Den, Barbara Di Eugenio, Paul Heisterkamp, Lynette 
Hirschrnan, Beth Arm Hockey, Kristiina Jokinen, Pamela Jordan, Hans Kamp, Ian Lewin, 
Daniel Marcu, Katashi Nagao, Laurent Romary, Remko Scha, Akira Shimazu, Candace 
Sidner, Mark Steedman, Michael Strube, Jan van Kuppevelt, and Marilyn Walker - for their 
work. We would also like to thank our invited speaker, Jens Allwood, for his contribution to 
the Workshop Program. We are sure that these efforts together with the active participation of 
workshop attendees will make the workshop a stimulating and constructive event for 
interchange of research results, ideas and visions for future work. 
Laila Dybkj~er, Natural Interactive Systems Laboratory, Denmark 
Koiti Hasida, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Japan 
David Tram, University of Maryland, USA 
CONFERENCE PROGRAM 
Saturday, October 7 
9:00-9:15 
9:15-10:45 
9:15-9:45 
Welcome 
Paper Session:: Annotation and Corpus Work 
Japanese Dialogue Corpus of Multi-Level Annotation 
Shu Nakazato 
9:45-10:15 ADAM? An Architecture for xml-based Dialogue Annotation on Multzple Levels 
Claudia Sofia, Roldano Cattoni and Morena Danieli 
10:15-10:45 The MATE Markup Framework 
Laila Dybkjmr and Niels Ole Bernsen 
10:45-11:15 Break 
11:15-12:15 Paper Session: Prosody and Dialogue 
11:15-11:45 Issues in the Transcription of English Conversational Grunts 
Nigel Ward 
11:45-12:15 Identi.~ing Prosodic Indicators of Dialogue Structure: 
Some Methodological and Theoretical Considerations 
Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirling, Janet Fletcher and Roger Wales 
12:15-14:15 Lunch and SlGdial Business Meeting 
14:15-16:15 Paper Session: Discourse 
14:15-14:45 From Elementary Discourse Units to Complex Ones 
Holger Schauer 
14:45-15:15 Abstract Anaphora Resolution in Danish 
Costanza Navarretta 
15:15-15:45 Using Decision Trees to Select the Grammatical Relation of a Noun Phrase 
Simon Corston-Oliver 
15:45-16:15 A Common Theory of Information Fusion from Multzple Text Sources. 
Step One: Cross-Document Structure 
Dragornir Radev 
16:15-16:40 Break 
16:40-18:00 Session on Cooperation 
16:40-17:30 Ideal Cooperation 
Jens Allwood (invited speaker) 
17:30-18:00 Social Goals in Conversational Cooperation 
Guido BoeUa, Rossana Darniano and Leonardo Lesmo 
ii 
Sunday, October 8 
9:00-10:00 Paper Session: Dialogue Management 
9:00-9:30 Dynamic User Level and Utility Measurement for Adaptive Dialog in a Help-Desk System 
Preetam Maloor and Joyce Chai 
9:30-10:00 Dialogue Management in the Agreement Negotiation Process: 
A Model that Involves Natural Reasoning 
Mare Koit and Haldur Oim 
10:00-10:30 Break 
10:30-12:00 Paper Session: Dialogue Management (continued) 
10:30-11:00 Document Transformations and Information States 
Staffan Larsson and Annie Zaenen 
11:00-11:30 Dialogue and Domain Knowledge Management in Dialogue Systems 
Annika Flycht-Eriksson and Ame J6nsson 
11:30-12:00 Flexible Speech Act Based Dialogue Management 
Eli Hagen and Fred Popowich 
12:00-13:30 Lunch 
13:30-14:30 Paper Session: Dialogue Systems and Tools 
13:30-14:00 Dialogue Helpsystem based on Flexible Matching of User Query with 
Natural Language Knowledge Base 
Sadao Kurohashi and Wataru Higasa 
14:00-14:30 WIT." A Toolkit for Building Robust and Real-7~me Spoken Dialogu Systems 
Mikio Nakano, Noboru Miyazaki, Norihito Yasuda, Akira Sugiyama, 
Jun-ichi Hirasawa, Kohji Dohsaka and Kiyoaki Aikawa 
14:30-15:00 Break 
15:00-16:30 Session on Evaluation 
15:00-15:30 Some Notes on the Complexity of Dialogues 
Jan Alexandersson and Paul Heisterkamp 
15:30-16:00 Designing Evaluation Environment 
Koiti Hasida 
16:00-16:30 Plenary discussion on evaluation 
16:30-17:00 Closing Discussion 
iii 
Table of Contents 
Japanese Dialogue Corpus of Multi-Level Annotation 
Shu Nakazato .......................................................................... 1 
ADAM: An Architecture for xml-based Dialogue Annotation on Multiple Levels 
Claudia Sofia, Roldano Cattoni and Morena Danieli ................................... 9 
The MATE Markup Framework 
Laila Dybkjmr and Niels Ole Bernsen ................................................ 19 
Issues in the Transcription of English Conversational Grunts 
Nigel Ward .......................................................................... 29 
Identifying Prosodic Indicators of Dialogue Structure: 
Some Methodological and Theoretical Considerations 
Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirring, Janet Fletcher and Roger Wales ........................ 36 
From Elementary Discourse Units to Complex Ones 
Holger Schaner ....................................................................... 46 
Abstract Anaphora Resolution in Danish 
Costanza Navarretta ................................................................. 56 
Using Decision Trees to Select the Grammatical Relation of a Noun Phrase 
Simon Corston-Oliver ................................................................ 66 
A Common Theory of Information Fusion .from Multiple Text Sources. 
Step One: Cross-Document Structure 
Dragomir Radev ..................................................................... 74 
Social Goals in Conversational Cooperation 
Guido Boella, Rossana Damiano and Leonardo Lesmo ................................ 84 
Dynamic User Level and Utility Measurement for Adaptive Dialog in a Help-Desk System 
Preetam Maloor and Joyce Chai ..................................................... 94 
Dialogue Management in the Agreement Negotiation Process: 
A Model that Involves Natural Reasoning 
Mare Koit and Haldur Oim ......................................................... 102 
Document Transformations and Information States 
Statfan Larsson and Annie Zaenen .................................................. 112 
Dialogue and Domain Knowledge Management in Dialogue Systems 
Annika Flycht-Eriksson and Arne JSnsson ........................................... 121 
Flexible Speech Act Based Dialogue Management 
Eli Hagen and Fred Popowich ....................................................... 131 
iv 
Dialogue Helpsystem based on Flexible Matching of User Query with 
Natural Language Knowledge Base 
Sadao Kurohashi and Wataru Higasa ................................................ 141 
WIT: A Toolkit for Building Robust and Real-Time Spoken Dialogu Systems 
Mikio Nakano, Noboru Miyazaki, Norihito Yasuda, Akira Sugiyama, 
Jun-ichi Hirasawa, Kohji Dohsaka and Kiyoaki Aikawa .............................. 150 
Some Notes on the Complexity of Dialogues 
Jan Alexandersson and Paul Heisterkamp ........................................... 160 
V 
Author Index 
Aikawa, Kiyoaki .......................................................................... 150 
Alexandersson, Jan ...................................................................... 160 
Bernsen, Niels Ole ........................................................................ 19 
BoeUa, Guido .............................................................................. 84 
Cattoni, Roldano .......................................................................... 9 
Chal, Joyce ............................................................................... 94 
Corston-Oliver, Simon .................................................................... 66 
Damiano, Rossana ........................................................................ 84 
Danieli, Morena ............................................................................ 9 
Dohsaka, Kohji ........................................................................... 150 
Dybkjr, Laila ............................................................................. 19 
Fletcher, Janet ............................................................................ 36 
Flycht-Eriksson, Annika .................................................................. 121 
Hagen, Eli ............................................................................... 131 
Heisterkamp, Paul ........................................................................ 160 
Higasa, Wataru .......................................................................... 141 
Hirasawa, Jun-ichi ....................................................................... 150 
Jnsson, Arne ............................................................................. 121 
Koit, Mare .............................................................................. 102 
Kurohashi, Sadao ........................................................................ 141 
Larsson, Staffan ......................................................................... 112 
Lesmo, Leonardo .......................................................................... 84 
Maloor, Preetam .......................................................................... 94 
Miyazaki, Noboru ........................................................................ 150 
Mushin, Ilana ............................................................................. 36 
Nakano, Mikio ........................................................................... 150 
Nakazato, Shu ............................................................................. 1 
Navarretta, Costaaaza ...................................................................... 56 
Oim, Haldur ............................................................................. 102 
Popowich, Fred ........................................................................... 131 
Radev, Dragomir ......................................................................... 74 
Schauer, Holger ........................................................................... 46 
Soria, Claudia .............................................................................. 9 
Stirling, Lesley. ........................................................................... 36 
Sugiyama, Akira ......................................................................... 150 
Wales, Roger ............................................................................. 36 
Ward, Nigel ............................................................................... 29 
Yasuda, Norihito ......................................................................... 150 
Zaenen, Annie ........................................................................... 112 
vi 
