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DialogueView: annotating dialogues in multiple views with abstraction†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2008

FAN YANG ,
PETER A. HEEMAN ,
KRISTY HOLLINGSHEAD  and
SUSAN E. STRAYER
FAN YANG
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
PETER A. HEEMAN
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
KRISTY HOLLINGSHEAD
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
SUSAN E. STRAYER
Affiliation:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, 20000 NW Walker Rd., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
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Abstract

This paper describes DialogueView, a tool for annotating dialogues with utterance boundaries, speech repairs, speech act tags, and hierarchical discourse blocks. The tool provides three views of a dialogue: WordView, which shows the transcribed words time-aligned with the audio signal; UtteranceView, which shows the dialogue line-by-line as if it were a script for a movie; and BlockView, which shows an outline of the dialogue. The different views provide different abstractions of what is occurring in the dialogue. Abstraction helps users focus on what is important for different annotation tasks. For example, for annotating speech repairs, utterance boundaries, and overlapping and abandoned utterances, the tool provides the exact timing information. For coding speech act tags and hierarchical discourse structure, a broader context is created by hiding such low-level details, which can still be accessed if needed. We find that the different abstractions allow users to annotate dialogues more quickly without sacrificing accuracy. The tool can be configured to meet the requirements of a variety of annotation schemes.

Type
Papers
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 3 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

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