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<Paper uid="J97-1002">
  <Title>The Reliability of a Dialogue Structure Coding Scheme</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Dialogue work, like the rest of linguistics, has traditionally used isolated examples, either constructed or real. Now many researchers are beginning to try to code large dialogue corpora for higher-level dialogue structure in the hope of giving their findings a firmer basis. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and describe the reliability of a scheme of dialogue coding distinctions that have been developed for use on the Map Task Corpus (Anderson et al. 1991). These dialogue structure distinctions were developed within a larger &amp;quot;vertical analysis&amp;quot; of dialogue encompassing a range of phenomena, beginning with speech characteristics, and therefore are intended to be useful whenever an expression of dialogue structure is required.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  2. Other Dialogue Structure Coding Schemes  A number of alternative ways of coding dialogue are mentioned in the recent literature. Walker and Whittaker (1990) mark utterances as assertions, commands, questions, or prompts (utterances that do not express proposition content) in an investigation of mixed initiative in dialogue. Sutton et al. (1995) classify the possible responses to a question in terms of whether or not they answer the question and how complete and concise the answer is, as part of designing an automated spoken questionnaire. Alexandersson et al. (1995) devise a set of 17 &amp;quot;speech acts&amp;quot; that occur in dialogues between people setting the date for a business meeting; some of these speech acts are task-specific. They use these speech acts to derive statistical predictions about which speech act will come next within VERBMOBIL, a speech-to-speech dialogue translation system that operates on demand for limited stretches of dialogue. Nagata and Mori- null moto (1993) use a set of nine more task-independent illocutionary force distinctions for a similar purpose. Ahrenberg, Dahlback, and J6nsson (1995) divide moves in Wizard-of-Oz information-seeking dialogues into initiations and responses and then further classify them according to the function they serve in the information transfer, in order to show how this relates to the focus structure of the dialogues. Condon and Cech (1996), while investigating the difference between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication, classify utterances according to the role they take in decision making. The coding described in this paper differs from all of these coding schemes in three important ways. First, although the move categories are informed by computational models of dialogue, the categories themselves are more independent of the task than schemes devised with particular machine dialogue types in mind. Second, although other coding schemes may distinguish many categories for utterances segmented according to the discourse goals they serve, by showing game and transaction structures this coding scheme attempts to classify dialogue structure at higher levels as well. Finally, although the other coding schemes appear to have been devised primarily with one purpose in mind, this coding scheme is intended to represent dialogue structure generically so that it can be used in conjunction with codings of many other dialogue phenomena.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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