Form, Intonation and Function of Clarification Requests in German Task-Oriented Spoken Dialogues

Abstract

We present a classification-scheme for describing the form (including intonation) and function of clarification requests (CRs) that is more fine-grained than extant classifications, and a study of a corpus of German task-oriented dialogues where we used this scheme to annotate the occuring CRs.Among the correlations between form and function we found was a hitherto undescribed correlation between intonation of CRs and their interpretation, which could possibly aid dialogue systems in interpreting CRs.