Conversation Acts, Interactional Structure, and Conversational Outcomes

Empirical Methods in Discourse: Interpretation and Generation

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

In this paper I will describe some work towards developing a reliable coding scheme for the purpose of representing relationships between moves in dialogues. The purpose of this coding scheme is to represent the interactional structure of negotiation discourse, particularly negotiations in which multiple points of negotiation are managed at once, so that it is possible to study correspondences between this structure and patterns of anaphora and referring expressions. I will discuss the results of an inter-coder reliability test which indicates that within one week totally inexperienced coders can make considerable progress towards learning how to apply this coding scheme consistently.