DialogueView: Annotating dialogues in multiple views with abstraction

Fan Yang, Peter A. Heeman, Kristy Hollingshead, Susan E. Strayer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3-32
Number of pages30
JournalNatural Language Engineering
Volume14
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2008

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Artificial Intelligence

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