Dialogue Acts, Synchronizing Units, and Anaphora Resolution

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus analysis, and a model of anaphora resolution in spontaneous spoken dialogues. The main finding of our corpus analysis is that less than half the pronouns and demonstratives have NP antecedents in the preceding text; 22% have sentential antecedents and the remainder have no identifiable linguistic antecedents. As part of the corpus analysis we present the results of inter-annotator agreement tests. These were carried out for the annotation of anaphor types and their antecedents, and for the segmentation of the dialogues into dialogue acts. The results of the inter-annotator agreement tests indicate that our classification method is reliable and that the annotated dialogues can be used as a standard against which to measure the performance of the anaphor resolution algorithm. The algorithm, based on Strube (1998), is capable of classifying pronouns and demonstratives, and co-indexing anaphors with NP and sentential antecedents. The domain from which potential antecedents for both individual and discourse-deictic anaphors can be elicited is defined in terms of dialogue acts. The dialogue segmentation method uses dialogue acts to form Synchronizing Units, which reflect the achievement of common ground (Stalnaker 1974, 1979). We show that predicate information, NP form, and dialogue structure can be successfully used in the resolution process.

Proceedings of the Fourth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

“…Since we also consider cataphoric relations, we reverse the rule to check the left frontier for these cases. Eckert and Strube (2000) define an anaphor to be I-incompatible if it occurs in a context in which it "cannot refer to an individual object." Adjectives can be used as contextual cues for I-incompatible anaphors in copular constructions (4).…”

“…These have been applied to English for dialogues (Byron and Allen, 1998;Eckert and Strube, 2000) and news and literature (Botley, 2006), Danish and Italian (Navarretta and Olsen, 2008;Poesio and Artstein, 2008;Caselli and Prodanof, 2010), and Spanish (Recasens, 2008). These studies find that discourse deixis occurs in different languages, although prevalence depends on the domain in question.…”

“…In addition to a corpus analysis, Eckert and Strube (2000) provide a schema for performing discourse deixis resolution that they evaluate by measuring inter-annotator agreement on five dialogues from the Switchboard corpus. Byron (2002) presents an early attempt at a practical system that handles discourse deixis.…”

“…Current state-of-the-art coreference resolution systems Durrett and Klein, 2014; focus on the former and ignore the latter cases. Corpus studies across several languages (Eckert and Strube, 2000;Botley, 2006;Recasens, 2008) have estimated that between 5% and 10% of pronouns in non-conversational data, and up to 20% in conversational, have verbal antecedents. A coreference system that is able to handle discourse deixis will thus be more accurate, and benefit downstream applications.…”

A framework for annotating information structure in discourse

“…Our annotation scheme for the discourse layer mainly builds on (Prince, 1992) and (Eckert and Strube, 2001), as well as on related work on annotation of anaphoric links (Passonneau, 1996;Hirschman and Chinchor, 1997;Davies et al, 1998;Poesio, 2000). Prince defines "old" and "new" with respect to the discourse model as well as the hearer's point of view.…”