N.b.: A Graphical User Interface For Annotating Spoken Dialogue

Empirical Methods in Discourse: Interpretation and Generation

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Corpora of transcribed and annotated dialogues are very useful for developing and evaluating the coverage of algorithms for discourse generation and interpretation and dialogue modelling. On the other hand, there is no agreement on the choice of units and conventions for annotating discourse constituents, and the annotation process can be difficult and prone to inconsistencies. This paper presents N.b., a graphical user interface for annotating the discourse structure of spoken dialogue. Different annotation instructions and different theories about discourse interpretation and generation can be easily incorporated in the annotation process without the need of changing the graphical user interface. The instructions and the annotated text are displayed in a clear-cut way, and typing is reduced to a minimum. We describe how to use N.b. for annotating embedded discourse segments and the system’s end-to-end performance in a transcribed dialogue.