Introduction

The CALLHOME Spanish Dialogue Act Annotation Corpus, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2001T61 and ISBN 1-58563-197-3, was developed under Project CLARITY. The goal of CLARITY was to glean discourse information from unrestricted conversational speech using shallow, corpus-based analysis. The annotation was carried out at Interactive Systems Labs at Carnegie Mellon University.

Data

This publication used a three-level coding scheme to manually tag the LDC CALLHOME Spanish Transcripts. The three levels of the coding scheme are:

1. a dialogue act level consisting of a tag set extended from DAMSL and Switchboard;
2. a dialogue game level featuring short sequences of dialogue acts
3. a genre level similiar to topical segments. All available (120) dialogues have been annotated.

Dialogue games are short sequences of dialogue acts such as question/answer pairs. Genres can be storytelling, discussion, planning, etc. Segmentation takes topics into account as well. Genres, games, and dialogue acts are annotated by type. Genres are additionally annotated for activities and topics (on a 0-5 scale), for the central object or person being discussed (who or what category), and contain a short synopsis of the segment.

All available 120 CALLHOME Spanish dialogues have been annotated. The dialogue act annotation scheme is a further development of the SwitchBoard DAMSL tagset. Dialogue games are short sequences of dialogue acts such as question/answer pairs. Genres can be storytelling, discussion, planning etc. and the segmentation takes topic into account as well. Genres, games and dialogue acts are annotated for their type. Genres are additionally annotated for activities and topics (on a 0-5 scale), for the central object or person being discussed (who or what category) and contain a short gist of the segment.

An example of the tagging from one conversation is presented below.

    
    
    
    
     Sm, 
     eso es para
    eso, de seguro. 
     No importa. 
     No importa. 
     Bueno
    aqum, la Zaida esta estudiando tambiin en la universidad con la Liana. 
    
     Y
    qui estudia, mama, 
     qui
    estan estudiando. 
     [background speech] 
     Estan estudiando
    Sociales. Ciencias Sociales. 
     Ah, 
     para
    maes- para maestra de Sociales. 
     Sm 
    
    

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