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<Paper uid="W99-0309">
  <Title>J The MATE meta-scheme for coreference in dialogues in multiple languages</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Olle of the goals of the Eu-funded MATE project is to develop tools to support some of the most popular dialogue coding activities, including annotation of syntactic information, information about 'coreference,' and information about dialogue acts. 1 A problem to be confronted when trying to develop such tools is the lack of universally agreed upon coding schemes for these 'levels'~-i.e., of specifications of a set of elements and attributes that will cover all of the information about that level that a researcher may wish to annotate, together with instructions for how to do so. What does exist at the moment is coding schemes for particular domains and/or applications: in the case of dialogue acts, for example, there are several 'specific' schemes for given applications, some of which have been shown to lead to reliable coding (Alexandersson et al., 1997; Carletta et al., 1997). Recently, attempts to come up with standards for a few of these levels have been made at workshops organized by the Discourse Resource Initiative (DRI). The DRI did come up with a proposal concerning the dialogue act level (Discourse Resource Initiative, 1997; Allen and Core, 1997), although there have been serious disagreements concerning the usefulness of such a 'standard' for this level, since it's not clear that it's possible to come up with a domain-independent definition of dialogue acts. No official recommendation has been made in the DRI for the so-called 'coreference' level, although the DRAMA scheme (Passonneau, 1997) has sometimes been discussed for this purpose.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this paper we report on the current proposal concerning the type of 'coreference' annotation to be supported by the MATE workbench, motivating our proposal by relation to previous proposals in tThe project's home page is at http ://mate. nis. sdu. dk/.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 2We use the term MARKUP LEVEL to refer to each of these types of annotation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> this area. The full proposal is available on-line at hl;tp: llwww, cogsci, ed. ac. ukl'poesio/MATE/ coreference_scheme.html.</Paragraph>
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