Modelling Structures for Situated Discourse

Abstract

This paper describes a corpus of situated multiparty chats developed for the STAC project (Strategic Conversation, ERC grant n. 269427). and annotated for discourse structure in the style of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher & Lascarides,2003). The STAC corpus is not only a rich source of data on strategic conversation, but also the first corpus that we are aware of that provides discourse structures for multiparty dialogues situated within a virtual environment. The corpus was annotated in two stages: we initially annotated the chat moves only, but later decided to annotate interactions between the chat moves and non-linguistic events from the virtual environment. This two-step procedure has allowed us quantify various ways in which adding information from the nonlinguistic context affects dialogue structure. In this paper, we look at how annotations based only on linguistic information were preserved once the nonlinguistic context was factored in. We explain that while the preservation of relation instances is relatively high when we move from one corpus to the other, there is little preservation of higher order structures that capture "the main point" of a dialogue and distinguish it from peripheral information.

Attribution and the discourse structure of reports

“…Since there seems to be little risk of confusion, I've decided to stick with the now established SDRT terminology (e.g. Asher et al 2006;Hunter 2016;Abrusán 2021). 5.…”

From Discourse Relations to Network Edges: A Network Theory Approach to Discourse Analysis

“…However, SDRT includes also Complex Discourse Units or CDUs to cope with semantic groupings of EDUs in the discourse and, recently, refs. [28,29,37] extended SDRT's classic definition of a discourse graph with a third type of node, the elementary event units or EEUs, so that nonlinguistic events are considered as nodes during the construction of the discourse graph. Here is the definition of a discourse graph by [28]:…”

“…[28,37] offer a formal model of situated dialogue to capture these effects and the study of STAC. The first discourse-annotated corpus that includes EEUs by [29] has already pointed out interesting ways that discourse is affected by the presence of EEUs. For instance, Figure 4, which displays the discourse graph of (4), taken from [29], shows the direct relation between the CDUs.…”

“…In this paper, we intend to focus on three different types of recorded discourse-annotated data spanning two languages, English and Greek: (a) the singleauthor written texts of two daily newspapers with large circulation in Greece that were included in the corpus C58 ( [26]) and (b) the multiparty dialogue texts of the STAC corpus annotated in two stages, resulting in two discourse-annotated versions; (i) the first version includes chat logs (or chat moves) recorded in a virtual environment during an online game session ( [27][28][29], and (ii) the second version includes the same multiparty dialogues accompanied by the messages automatically generated by the game software. These messages describe the nonlinguistic events that take place during a game session and thus situate the linguistic utterances in the broader nonlinguistic context of usage.…”

DialogXL: All-in-One XLNet for Multi-Party Conversation Emotion Recognition

“…The corpus for in-domain post-training is the combination of the four conversation datasets introduced in Section 3.1, the STAC [13] and Molweni-DP [1] corpora, and an open-source corpus 3 collected from the TV show Friends. For RoBERTa, the masked language modeling task is applied for in-domain post-training; and for BART, the masked language recovering task is applied.…”