STANDARDISATION EFFORTS ON THE LEVEL OF DIALOGUE ACT IN THE MATE PROJECT

Abstract

This paper describes the state of the art of coding schemes for dialogue acts and the efforts to establish a standard in this field. We present a review and comparison of currently available schemes and outline the comparison problems we had due to domain, task, and language dependencies of schemes. We discuss solution strategies which have in mind the reusability of corpora. Reusability is a crucial point because production and annotation of corpora is very time and cost consuming but the current broad variety of schemes makes reusability of annotated corpora very hard. The work of this paper takes place in the framework of the Euro- pean Union funded MATE project. MATE aims to develop general methodological guidelines for the creation, annotation, retrieval and analysis of annotated corpora.