DIT++ Taxonomy of Dialogue Acts, Annotation Scheme, and DiAML
Markup Language

Release 5.2 (2019)

What's new in release 5.2

The DIT++ Taxonomy --- Concept definitions --- DiAML
Annotation guidelines --- Annotated examples --- ISO standard 24617-2 (Second Edition, 2020)
The DialogBank --- Publications

DIT++ is a semantically based framework for the analysis of human and human-machine dialogue, and for annotating dialogue with information about the communicative acts ('dialogue acts') that are expressed by dialogue segments. DIT++ consists of (1) a comprehensive, application-independent multidimensional taxonomy of communicative functions which are semantically defined in terms of their information-state changing potential, (2) the definition of a set of 10 orthogonal dimensions to which a dialogue act may belong, which offers a basis for understanding the multifunctionality of utterances in dialogue, (3) the definition of various kinds of semantic and pragmatic relations between dialogue acts, and (4) the specification of a small set of 'qualifiers' that may be used to indicate a speaker's uncertainty, reservations ('conditionality'), or sentiment. The Dialogue Act Markup Language (DiAML) was designed to use the concepts of DIT++ in dialogue act annotation and in the specification of dialogue acts in online recognition, interpretation, or generation of spoken, written, or multimodal dialogue.

The DIT++ taxonomy was constructed by extending the taxonomy of Dynamic Interpretation Theory (DIT), originally developed for information dialogues (Bunt, 1989; 1994), with a number of dialogue act types from DAMSL (Allen & Core, 1997) and other annotation schemes and dialogue studies.

Release 5.1 was developed in tandem with the definition of ISO standard 24617-2:2012 (September 2012) for dialogue act annotation. This concerns in particular (1) the definitions of the communicative functions in the DIT++ taxonomy and those included in the ISO standard, which have been made identical, and (2) the definition of the DiAML markup language, which can be used both with the concepts defined in DIT++ and with those defined in the ISO standard (see the annotated examples). The DIT++ release 5.1 annotation scheme is thus fully compatible with ISO 24617-2:2012. It is in some respects more fine-grained than the ISO scheme; where the latter includes 56 communicative functions, the DIT++ scheme (release 5.1) contains 88 functions, including notably more detailed feedback functions, more functions for discourse structuring and for social aspects of interacting, and functions for contact management (a dimension that is not included in the ISO 24617-2:2012 standard).

Experiences in the use of DIT++ Release 5.1 and of the ISO 24617-2 annotation scheme have inspired some improvements and extensions to DIT++ release 5.1 which are included in Release 5.2 and which are the basis of the second edition of the ISO 24617-2 standard, established in December 2020. Release 5.2 is an upward compatible revision of Release 5.1 in the sense that all annotations made according to Release 5.1 are also valid according to Release 5.2. The taxonomy of communicative functions is only extended; some other aspects have been improved. Release 5.2 includes a number of new elements that allow more accurate annotation of relations among dialogue acts. Moreover, the concept of a 'plug-in annotation scheme' has been introduced (Bunt, 2019), which allows various ways of enriching and customizing dialogue act annotation/specification. In particular, plug-in schemes are defined for (1) enriching DIT++ descriptions of dialogue acts with semantic content information; (2) introducing task- or domain-specific communicative functions; (3) annotating casual talk, for example in the opening and closing phases of a dialogue; and (4) indicating speaker emotions, importing elements from EmotionML. See 'New in Release 5.2' for a summary description of what's new in this release.

The concepts of DIT++ have been applied and evaluated in a number of annotation efforts and in the design of the ISO 24617-2 standard for dialogue act annotation. For some of its applications to annotation, see Geertzen and Bunt (2006), Petukhova and Bunt (2007), Geertzen et al. (2007), Petukhova, 2011, Fang et al. (2012), Petukhova & Bunt (2012), Bunt et al. (2019).

Another application is in the design of a dialogue manager module that is capable of generating multifunctional contributions to a dialogue; see Keizer and Bunt, 2006, Keizer and Bunt, 2007, Keizer et al., 2011, Malchanau et al., 2015 Malchanau et al., 2018; Malchanau 2019.

For the use of the DIT++ taxonomy and DIT more generally in other studies of dialogue see: Geertzen (2009), Morante (2007), Bunt (2011), Petukhova (2011), and the publications listed in Part 7 of this document.

The rest of this documentation consists of seven parts:

New in release 5.2:

Release 5.1:

Differences between release 5.1 and the previous release 4 (from February 2010): most importantly, release 5.1 has been developed in tandem with the definition of ISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation. In particular, the definitions of the communicative functions in the DIT++ taxonomy and those included in the ISO standard have been made identical. Since the latter form a subset of the former, DIT++ release 5.1 is a fully ISO-compatible dialogue act annotation scheme which is somewhat more fine-grained than the ISO scheme.


DIT++ Taxonomy of Communicative Functions

The DIT++ taxonomy forms a multidimensional system not only in the sense that it supports the assignment of multiple communicative functions to dialogue segments, but also in the sense that dimensions have a well-defined conceptual status in dialogue analysis, as different aspects of communication that may be addressed independent of each other (see Bunt, 2006). For annotation, the multidimensionality of the schema means that a functionally relevant segment of dialogue behaviour may be tagged as having more than one communicative function -- maximally one in each dimension if the tagging of implied functions is avoided. Dimensions are represented in the presentation of the taxonomy in boldface italic.


Some communicative functions can only be used in a particular dimension. For example, Turn Take and Turn Release are two function which can only be used for turn management, and Stalling and Pausing are two functions that can only be used for Time Management. Such functions are called dimension-specific. Other functions can be used in any dimension, for instance a Request can be related to the performance of the task that motivates the dialogue, but it can also be used for time management (Could you give me just a few minutes?) or for feedback (Could you please clarify that?); such functions are called general-purpose communicative functions. The DIT++ taxonomy thus consists of two parts: (A) that of the general-purpose functions and (B) that of the dimension-specific functions. In the presentation of the DIT++ communicative functions below, first the general-purpose functions are shown and subsequently the dimension-specific functions. For convenience, the taxonomy is structured not only in dimensions but also in some additional groupings that do not have a theoretical significane, but that are convenient for seeing the structure of the set of communicative functions, as well for referring to certain groups of functions. Such groupings are represented in italics.
  • General-Purpose Communicative Functions
  • Dimension-Specific Communicative Functions


    Definitions of DIT++ communicative functions


    In the definitions of communicative functions, the hierarchical relations will be exploited by only specifying the way in which the preconditions of a communicative function strenghten or are additional to those of its ancestors.

    To see examples, click at the communicative function name.

  • General-Purpose Communicative Functions are functions that can be applied to any kind of semantic content.
    They are often applied to information concerning the task or activity that motivates the dialogue, and in that case they form a dialogue act in the Task/Activity dimension.
    In information-seeking dialogues, advice-giving dialogues, and other dialogues whose primary motivation is to exchange certain information, the general-purpose functions are the only functions that are needed in the Task/Activity dimensions. In other types of dialogue one finds besides the general-prupose functions als certain activity-specific communicative functions, some examples of which are mentioned above.
    General-purpose functions can also be applied to content concerning the communication, in which case they form a `dialogue control act'. For example, the utterance I did not hear what you said has the general-purpose function Inform, and in view of the type of is semantic content, it provides (negative) feedback about the speaker's perception of the previous utterance (forming a dialogue act in the Auto-Feedback dimension).


    Examples of DIT++ dialogue acts

    Sources:

    'LIRICS' = from the LIRICS project multilingual test suite of dialogues (in English, Dutch, and Italian);
    'DIAMOND' = from the DIAMOND project corpus of dialogues (in Dutch);
    'IMIX' = from the IMIX project corpus of dialogues (in Dutch);
    'AMI' = from the AMI project corpus of dialogues (in English)
    'SCHISMA' = from the SCHISMA project corpus of dialogues (in Dutch);
    'OVIS" = from the OVIS project corpus of dialogues (in Dutch).
  • General-Purpose Communicative Functions
  • Action-discussion function
  • Feedback Elicitation acts:
  • Partner Communication Management acts
  • Own Communication Management acts
  • Time management acts
  • Discourse structure management acts:
  • Social obligations management acts
    annotated examples


    DiAML: the Dialogue Act Markup Language

    Basic DIT concepts

    Dalogue acts

    The term ‘dialogue act' is often used rather loosely in the sense of speech act used in dialogue. Indeed, the idea of interpreting communicative behaviour in terms of actions, such as questions, promises, and requests goes back to speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). But where speech act theory is primarily an action-based approach to meaning within the philosophy of language, dialogue act theory is an empirically-based approach to the computational modeling of linguistic and nonverbal communicative behaviour in dialogue. Dialogue acts offer a way of characterizing the meaning of communicative behaviour in terms of update operations, to be applied to the information states of participants in the dialogue; this approach is commonly known as the ‘information-state update’ or ‘context-change’ approach -- see e.g. Bunt (1989; 2000a); Traum and Larsson (2003). For instance, when an addressee understands the utterance “Do you know what time it is?” as a question about the time, then the addressee’s information state is updated to contain (among other things) the information that the speaker does not know what time it is and would like to know that. If, by contrast, it is understood that the speaker is reproaching the addressee for being late, then the addressee’s information state is updated to include (among other things) the information that the speaker does know what time it is. Distinctions such as that between a question and a reproach concern the communicative function of a dialogue act, which is one of its two main components. The other main component is its semantic content, which describes the objects, properties, relations, situations, actions or events that the dialogue act is about. The communicative function of a dialogue act specifies how an addressee updates his information state with the information expressed in the semantic content when he understands the dialogue act.

    This approach to the definition of communicative functions is strictly semantic, in contrast to approaches based on linguistic form. For example, the behaviour of a speaker who repeats something that was said by someone else may be characterised as a ‘repetition’ (which is a communicative function in some annotation schemes); however, this only says something about the form of the behaviour compared to the repeated behaviour, not about its function. A repetition often has a feedback function, as in (D1).a, but it can also have other functions, as in (D1).b, where it is used as a confirmation in response to a check question:

    (D1) S: There are evening flights at seven-fifteen and eight-thirty 
     a. C: Seven-fifteen and eight-thirty
     b. C: And that’s on Sunday too 
        S: And that’s on Sunday too

    A form-related requirement for introducing a communicative function is however that there are observable features of communicative (linguistic and/or nonverbal) behaviour which are indicative for that function in the context in which the behaviour occurs. This requirement puts all communicative functions on an empirical basis. Dialogue act annotation is the marking up of stretches of dialogue with information about the dialogue acts they contain. Spoken dialogues are traditionally segmented into turns, defined as stretches of communicative behaviour produced by one speaker, bounded by periods of inactivity of that speaker. Turns can be quite long and complex, and are therefore not the most useful units of behaviour to assign communicative functions to. Communicative functions can be assigned more accurately to smaller units, which are called functional segments, and which are defined as the minimal stretches of communicative behaviour that are functionally relevant.

    Inherent to the notion of a dialogue act is that there is an agent who produces the dialogue act, called the ‘sender’, and one or more agents who are addressed, called the ‘addressee(s)’. Dialogue studies often focus on two-person dialogues, in which case the dialogue acts have only one addressee. Besides sender and addressee(s), there may be various types of side-participants who are present but do not or only marginally participate (see Clark, 1996).

    Dialogue act annotation is often limited to assigning communicative functions to dialogue segments, which corresponds intuitively to indicating the type of communicative action that is performed. A semantically more complete characterization additionally provides information about the category of semantic content. The DAMSL annotation scheme distinguishes three categories of semantic content: Task, Task Management, and Communication, which indicate whether the semantic content of the dialogue act advances the task which underlies the dialogue, or discusses how to perform the task, or concerns the communication process. DIT++ distinguishes 10 subcategories of communication-related information, such as feedback information, turn allocation information, and speech management information. These categories of semantic content are also called ‘dimensions’.

    Example (D2) illustrates the use of the key attributes of a dialogue act in the DiAML annotation of a task-related yes-no question addressed by speaker ‘a’ to addressee ‘b’, expressed by the functional segment ‘m1’: 

    (D2)	< dialogueAct xml:id="da1" target="#m1" sender="#a" addressee="#b" dimension="task" communicativeFunction="propositionalQuestion"/>

    Dependence relations

    Some types of dialogue acts are inherently dependent for their full meaning on one or more dialogue acts that occurred earlier in the dialogue. This is for example the case for answers, whose meaning is partly determined by the question that is being answered, and also for the acceptance or rejection of offers, suggestions, requests, and apologies. This is illustrated in example (D3), where the meaning of the answer in turn 3 depends on whether it is an answer to the question in turn 1 or to the one in turn 2.

    (D3) 1. B: Do you know who’s coming tonight? 
     2. B: Which of the project members do you think will be there? 
     3. A: I’m expecting Jan, Alex, Claudia, and David, and maybe Olga and Andrei.

    As an answer to the question in 1, A’s answer says that nobody else is expected to come than the people that are mentioned, but as an answer to the question in 2 it leaves open the possibility that other people will come, who are not members of ‘the project’. This kind of semantic dependence, which is due to the responsive character of some communicative functions, is called a functional dependence relation. Marking up this relation between a dialogue act with a responsive communicative function and its ‘antecedent’ dialogue acts allows the annotation to not just indicate e.g. that an utterance has the function of an answer, but also to indicate to which question it is an answer, as illustrated in (D4). 

    (D4) a. B: Which of the project members do you think will be there?  
	A: I’m expecting Jan, Alex, Claudia, and David, and maybe Olga and Andrei.

     b. < dialogueAct xml:id="da1" target="#m1" sender="#b" addressee="#a" dimension="task" communicativeFunction="setQuestion"/>
	< dialogueAct xml:id="da2" target="#m2" sender="#a" addressee="#b" dimension="task" communicativeFunction="answer" functionalDependence=”#da1”/>

    Positive and negative feedback-providing acts depend for their interpretation also on what happened earlier in the dialogue, but in a different way. They are concerned with the processing of what was said before - such as its perception or its interpretation. This is illustrated by the examples in (D5). 

    (D5) 1. A: The flight on Tuesday would suit me really well. 
       	B: Okay.

     2. A: The flight on Tuesday would suit me really well.
	B: On Tuesday?

    In the first example B indicates that he has correctly understood A’s remark; in the second he checks whether he heard (or remembers) correctly what A said. This relation between a positive or negative feedback act ant its ‘antecedent’ is called a feedback dependence relation.

    A feedback dependence relation indicates one or more preceding dialogue acts if the feedback concerns high-level processing, such as understanding, and it indicates a dialogue segment in the case of low-level processing, such as hearing what was said. In the latter case, the feedback dependence relation was annotated according to Release 5.1 as referring to the smallest functional segment containing the segment that the feedback act is about. This way of annotating feedback dependence relations is not quite accurate, since feedback about a stretch of communicative behaviour smaller than a functional segment is not about the entire segment. For example, negative feedback that signals a problem in hearing certain words may imply positive feedback about the rest of the segment. Similarly for feedback-eliciting acts and for dialogue acts in the Own Communication Management (OCM) dimension or in the Partner Communication Management (PCM) dimension. In particular, Self-Corrections and Partner Corrections frequently refer to a single word or phrase which does not form a functional segment. To make more accurate annotation possible, Release 5.2 introduces a ‘reference segment’ as being a stretch of communicative behaviour that is the object of a feedback dependence relation and that is not a functional segment.

    Rhetorical relations

    Dialogue acts may also be semantically and pragmatically related through rhetorical relations. These have been studied extensively for their occurrence in written discourse, and are also known as 'discourse relations'. They occur also in (spoken and multimodal), dialogue, as in the examples shown in (D6).

    (D6)	1. A: It ties you on in terms of the technology and the complexity that you want 
   	2. A: like for example voice recognition 
   	3. A: because you might need to power a microphone and other things 
        4. A: so that’s one constraint there

    In this example we see a sequence of four functional segments contributed by the same participant. The segments in lines 2-4 are all related to the dialogue act expressed in the first segment. Segment 2 is related to the initial statement through an Exemplification relation, segment 3 through a Cause relation, and segment 4 through a Restatement relation.

    A wide diversity of sets of rhetorical relations has been proposed (see e.g. Hobbs, 1979; Mann and Thompson, 1988; Lascarides and Asher, 1991, Hovy and Maier, 1993; Prasad et al., 2008; Sanders et al., 1992), which has inspired a great deal of discussion, comparisons, and attempts to specify mappings between various sets (Benamara and Taboada, 2015; Bunt and Prasad, 2016; Schefler and Stede, 2016; Demberg et al., 2017; Sanders et al., 2018). In view of this situation, DIT++ does not propose any specific set of relations to be used, but only provides a conceptual category for which a set of relations may be specified. In Release 5.1, this provision plays out at the level of concrete DiAML syntax in the definition of an XML element called ‘< rhetoricalLink>’ which has attributes referring to two dialogue acts and an attribute for whose value a rhetorical relation can be specified. Example (N@) anove illustrates the use of this provision for indicating a causal relation between two dialogue acts.

    In 2015, Prasad & Bunt defined a set of 18 ‘core’ rhetorical relations which occur in some form in most annotation schemes for rhetorical relations (see Prasad and Bunt, 2015), and a proposal for using this set for defining an ISO annotation standard. This has become 24617-8:2016, a.k.a. DR-Core. The DR-Core relations have been used in DiAML annotations as values of the @rhetoRel attribute in several annotation efforts (see e.g. Petukhova et al., 2014 and Bunt et al., 2019). The < rhetoricalLink> element was found to be rather coarse-grained, however, for the two limitations already mentioned: (1) it is not possible to indicate the roles of the arguments; and (2) it is not possible to distinguish between ‘semantic’ and a ‘pragmatic’ variants of a relation. The distinction is illustrated in (P11) avbove.

    In Release 5.2 the constructs < drLink > and < argRole > are introduced in the DiAML-XML concrete syntax, and the conceptual structures that they encode are added to the DiAML abstract syntax with their semantics. Semantically the structure is similar to the element; the interpretation consists of an update operation that inserts the semantic relation in an addressee’s information state, adding a specification of the argument roles.

    Qualifiers

    The examples in (D7) illustrate another phenomenon that is frequently found in dialogue, namely that speakers may are uncertain about the information they provide, as in B’s utterance in (D7)a), or about their commitment to the performance of an action, as in (D7)b1. Speakers may also express a certain sentiment about the information or event that is being discussed, as in (D7.b3), or express a reservation in the form of a condition, as in (D7.b2), where an offer is conditionally accepted. For the annotation of conditions, uncertainty, and sentiment, DIT++ makes use of so-called qualifiers. Example (D7)c, annotating (D7)b2, illustrates their use.

    (D7) 	a. A: Do you know what time the meeting starts?
 	   B: At 4 p.m. I think.

	b. A: Would you like to have some coffee? 
	   1. B: Maybe later.
	   2. B: Only if you have it ready.
           3. B: Yes please!

        c. < dialogueAct xml:id="da2" target="#m2" sender="#b" addressee="#a" dimension="task" communicativeFunction="acceptRequest"
             functionalDependence=”#da1” conditionality="conditional"/>

    According to the annotation theory that underlies dialogue act annotation with the DIT++ scheme (Bunt, 2010; 2013; 2015; Pustejovsky et al., 2017) semantic annotations must have besides a concrete representation format also a format-independent abstract syntax and a semantics. The annotation theory implements the distinction made in the ISO Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF, ISO 24612:2009) between annotations and representations. The term ‘annotation' refers to the linguistic information that is added to segments of language data, independent of the format in which the information is presented; ‘representation' refers to the format in which an annotation is rendered. This distinction is implemented in the DiAML definition by a syntax specification that defines, besides a class of XML-based representation structures, also a class of more abstract annotation structures. These specifications are called the concrete syntax and the abstract syntax, respectively. Annotation structures are set-theoretical structures. The concrete syntax defines a reference format for rendering annotation structures in XML. Alternative representation formats for DiAML annotation structures are discussed in Bunt et al. (2019). For a detailed specification of the semantics of DiAML annotation structures see Bunt (2014).

    DiAML Abstract syntax

    The abstract syntax of DiAML consists of: (a) a specification of the elements from which annotation structures are built up, called a ‘conceptual inventory', and (b) a specification of the possible ways of combining these elements to form annotation structures.

    The conceptual inventory of DiAML consists of sets of dialogue participants, dimensions, communicative functions, functional segments, and qualifiers.

    An annotation structure is a collection of entity structures and link structures. Entity structures contain semantic information about a dialogue segment; link structures describe semantic relations between entity stuctures. Entity structures are always of the general form 〈m,z〉, where ‘m’ is a markable and ‘z’ designates a structure that describes some linguistic information. Link structures are typically of the form 〈e1, e2, R〉, consisting of two entity structures and a relation.

    The entity structure of central interest in DiAML is a pair 〈m,α〉 of which the linguistic information ‘α’ is a so-called ‘dialogue act structure’. A dialogue act structure contains the information that characterizes a single dialogue act. This includes minimally a specification of the sender, the addressee(s), and the communicative function. For dialogue acts with a general-purpose communicative function, the dimension of the semantic content is another component; for dialogue acts with a dimension-specific function the dimension does not need to be specified, since it is inherent in the definition of the function. General-purpose functions may additionally have one or more qualifiers. For a dialogue act which depends semantically on (the interpretation of) one or more previous dialogue segments, a sixth component is a set E of elements that the act depends on through functional or feedback dependence relations. In a setting in which other participants than the sender and the addressees should be taken into account, an additional element is a set H of ‘other participants’. A dialogue act structure is therefore in the simplest case a triple 〈S, A, fd〉, consisting of a sender S, a (set of) addressee(s) A, and a dimension-specific function fd, and in the most complex case a 7-tuple as in (19), with a general-purpose function f, a dimension d,, a set q of one or more qualifiers, and a set E of one or more dialogue units that the act depends on.

    (D8) α = 〈S, A, H, f, d, q, E〉

    A link structure in DiAML is a triple 〈ε, E, ρ〉 consisting of an entity structure ε, a set E of one or more entity structures, and a rhetorical relation ρ, which relates the dialogue act in ε to those in E.

    Concrete syntax

    The DiAML concrete syntax is defined in accordance with the CASCADES methodology for developing semantic annotation languages, described in Bunt (2013 and Pustejovsky et al. (2017). This methodology includes the notion of an ideal representation format, defined as one which is (1) ‘complete' in the sense that every annotation structure defined by the abstract syntax can be represented, and (2) ‘unambiguous' in the sense that every representation defined by the concrete syntax represents one and only one annotation structure defined by the abstract syntax. Since the semantics of DiAML is defined for the structures defined by the abstract syntax, any two representation formats which are ‘ideal' in this sense are semantically equivalent, and every representation in one such format can be converted by a meaning-preserving mapping into any other such format. The DiAML concrete syntax specifies a reference representation format based on XML, often referred to as 'DiAML-XML'. This specification lists names of XML tags, attributes, and values corresponding to the various ingredients in the conceptual inventory, and defines the possible ways of combining these elements in XML structures. In particular, XML elements are defined for entity structures and link structures.

    Entity structures for dialogue acts are represented by a DiAml-XML element called < dialogueAct>, which has the following attributes:

    Link structures are represented either by the DiAML-XML element < rhetoricalLink> or by the element < drLink> (annotators can choose either). The < rhetoricalLink> element has the following attributes:

    The < drLink> element has the following attributes:

    Example (20c-d), shows the abstract annotation structure and its DiAML-XML representation of the dialogue fragment in (20a), segmented as shown in (20b).

     
(20a) 	P1: What time does the next train to Utrecht leave?
    	P2: The next train to Utrecht leaves I think at 8:32.

    Annotations may be attached to primary dialogue data in a variety of ways; they may be attached directly to stretches of speech, defined by temporal begin- and end points, or to structures at lower levels of description, such as the output of a tokenizer. Here it is assumed that functional segments are identified at another level of XML representation. P2's utterance is segmented into two overlapping functional segments: m2 in the Auto-Feedback dimension (reflecting that the repetition of a large part of an utterance signals positive feedback on understanding it) and m3 in the Task dimension.. Following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI P5, 2010), the prefix '#' is used to indicate that the prefixed value is identified either in the metadata of the primary data or in another layer of annotation, or elsewhere within the same representation. Note that the abstract annotation structure in (D9c) is a set of three elements, corresponding to the three dialogue acts in this fragment, where the second and the third element both have the first element embedded, indicating their dependence on the first dialogue act. 

    (D9b) 	Segmentation of the exchange in (D9a):
	m1 = What time does the next train to Utrecht leave? (Task dimension)
      	m2 = The next train to Utrecht leaves (Auto-Feedback dimension)
        m3 = “The next train to Utrecht leaves I think at 8:32.“ (Task dimension).
(D9c)	Annotation structure according to DiAML abstract syntax:
	{〈m1,〈p1,p2,setQuestion,Task〉, 
	 〈m2,〈p2,p1,autoPositive,{〈m1,〈p1,p2,setQuestion,Task〉〉}〉, 
         〈m3,〈p2,p1,aswer,Task,{uncertain},{〈m1,〈p1,p2,setQuestion,Task〉〉}〉〉}   
(D9c) 	DiAML-XML annotation representation:
	< diaml xmlns:"http://www.iso.org/diaml/"> 
          < dialogueAct xml:id="da1" target="#m1" sender="#p1" addressee="#p2" 
            communicativeFunction="setQuestion" dimension="task"/> 
          < dialogueAct xml:id="da2" target="#m2" sender="#p2" addressee="#p1" 
            communicativeFunction="autoPositive" feedbackDependence="#da1"/>
       	  < dialogueAct xml:id="da3" target="#m3" sender="#p2" addressee="#p1" 
            communicativeFunction="answer" certainty="uncertain" dimension="task" 
            functionalDependence="#da1"/>
      	< /diaml>
    Semantics

    DiAML annotation structures have a semantics in terms of information-state updates. The most important kind of structure defined by the DiAML abstract syntax, the dialogue act structure, is a functional characterization of a dialogue act. It does not correspond to a complete dialogue act, since it does not include the semantic content (but only a semantic content category, a ‘dimension’). The semantics of a complete dialogue act is obtained by combining the interpretation of a dialogue act structure with a semantic content. This is accomplished by applying the interpretation Ia(〈s,α〉) of an entity structure which contains a dialogue act structure α, to the semantic content κ(s) of the functional segment that expresses the dialogue act. The result is an information state update operation as shown in (D10) for a dialogue act that has no functional dependences to other dialogue acts.

    (D10) Ia(〈s,α〉) = Ia(α)(κ(s))

    The interpretation Ia(α) of a dialogue act structure α is defined as follows for dialogue acts without qualifiers:

    (D11) Ia(〈S,A,f,d〉) = Ia(f)(Ia(S), Ia(A), Ia(d))

    i.e. the interpretation of a dialogue act structure is the interpretation of its communicative function, applied to the interpretations of its sender, its addressee, and its dimension. For more details see Bunt (2014).


    ISO dialogue act annotation standard 24617-2, First and Second Edition

    First Edition, September 2012

    ISO 24617-2 is an ISO international standard for the annotation of dialogue with dialogue act information. The technical content of the standard was formally approved (by the national standardization bodies participating in ISO), and the official registration of the standard occurred on 4 September 2012 when the document which describes the standard was published by the ISO Central Secretariat in Geneva. A pre-final version of the document describing the standard can be found here; the final version can be obtained from ISO and from the national standardization institutes.

    A variety of English and Dutch dialogues, annotated according to the ISO 24617-2 standard, has been collected in the DialogBank resource.

    The ISO scheme for dialogue act annotation is a subset of release 5 of the DIT++ scheme, or rather, release 5 of the DIT++ annotation scheme is an extension of the scheme described in the ISO standard. The DIT++ annotation scheme can thus be said to be strictly ISO-compatible, and in some respects more fine-grained.

    The project team that has developed this standard consists of: Jan Alexandersson, Harry Bunt (project leader), Jean Carletta, Jae-Woong Choe, Alex Chengyu Fang, Koiti Hasida, Volha Petukhova, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Claudia Soria, and David Traum.

    The project team was supported by an Expert Consultancy Group, consisting of: James Allen, Jens Allwood, Nick Campbell, Roberta Catizone, Thierry Declerck, Anna Esposito, Raquel Fernandez, Giacomo Ferrari, Gil Francopoulo, Dirk Heylen, Julia Hirschberg, Kristiina Jokinen, Maciej Karpinski, Staffan Larsson, Kiyong Lee, Oliver Lemon, Carlos Martinez-Hinarejos, Paul Mc Kevitt, Michael McTear, David Novick, Tim Paek, Patrizia Paggio, Catherine Pelachaud, Massimo Poesio, German Rigau, Laurent Romary, Nicla Rossini, Milan Rusko, Candice Sidner, Pavel Smrz, Marieke van Erp, Ielka van der Sluis, Kristinn Thorisson, Aesoon Yoon, Yorick Wilks.

    The following papers summarize the standard and describe its use:
    Harry Bunt
    Guidelines for using ISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue annotation. TiCC Technical Report 2019-1, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication and Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University.

    Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, Andrei Malchanau, Alex Chengyu Fang, and Kars Wijnhoven
    'The DialogBank: Dialogues with Interoperable Annotations'. Language Resources and Evaluation 2019. Available online at DOI: 10.1007/s10579-018-9436-9

    Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, David Traum, and Jan Alexandersson
    'Dialogue Act Annotation with the ISO 24617-2 Standard'. In Deborah Dahl (ed.) Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Towards Natural User Interaces to Everything Springer, Cham (Switzerland), 2017. pp. 109-135.

    Harry Bunt, Jan Alexandersson, Jean Carletta, Jae-Woong Choe, Alex Chengyu Fang, Koiti Hasida, Kiyong Lee, Volha Petukhova, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Laurent Romary, Claudia Soria, and David Traum:
    "Towards an ISO standard for dialogue act annotation". In Proceedings of LREC 2010, May 2010, Malta.

    Harry Bunt, Jan Alexandersson, Jae-Woong Choe, Alex Chengyu Fang, Koiti Hasida, Volha Petukhova, Andrei Popescu-Belis, and David Traum:
    "ISO 24617-2: A semantically-based standard for dialogue annotation". In Proceedings of LREC 2012, May 2012, Istanbul.

    Second Edition, December 2020

    Following the ISO practice of reviewing its standards every five years, the first edition ISO 24617-2:12 was examined in 2017-2018 for the need of revision. At a meeting in September 2017 it was concluded that some minor revisions would be desirable, as well as some extensions. These were discussed in a meeting of users of the first edition in Tilburg, April 2018, including Pierere Andre, Shammur Chowdhury, Emer Gilmartin, Simon Keizer, Andrei Malchanau, Catherine Pelachaud, Volha Petukhova, Laurent Prévot, Mariet Theune, Kars Wijnhoven and Harry Bunt, and at the ISA-14 workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 2018.

    Additionally, possibilities for extending the standard were discussed at the ISA-15 workshop on Gothenburg, May 2019, where the notion of 3-part layered plug-ins was discussed, which was introduced in DIT++ release 5.2. A proposal for a revised, second edition of the standard was submitted to the ISO organization in 2019 and was approved in an international ballot in February 2020 -- see the ISO/DIS document. The following papers are about the revision of the first edition of the standard, discussing limitations and proposing improvements and extensions:

    Harry Bunt
    Plug-ins for content annotation of dialogue acts.
    In Proceedings of the 15th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-15) at IWCS 2019, Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 34-45.
    Harry Bunt, Emer Gilmartin, Catherine Pelachaud, Volha Petukhova, Laurent Prévot and Mariet Theune (2018)
    Downward Compatible Revision of Dialogue Act Annotation.
    In Proceedings 14th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-14) at COLING 2018, Santa Fé, New Mexico, pp. 21-34.
    Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova and Alex Chengyu Fang
    'Revisiting the ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation.'
    In Proceedings 13th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-13) at IWCS 2017, Montpellier, France, September 2017.


    DIT++ or ISO 24617-2 related publications

    Tatiana Anikina and Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova
    'Dialogue Act Classification in Team Communication for Robot Assisted Isaster Response'. In Proceedings 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2019, pp. 399-410.
    Harry Bunt
    'Plug-ins for content annotation of dialogue acts'. In Proceedings 15th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISBN 978907402384), Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2019, pp. 33-45.
    Simon Keizer, Ondrej Dusek, Xingkun Liu and Verena Rieser
    'User Evaluation of a Multi-dimensional Statistical Dialogue System'. In Proceedings 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2019, pp. 392-398.
    Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, Andrei Malchanau, Alex Chengyu Fang, and Kars Wijnhoven
    'The DialogBank: Dialogues with Interoperable Annotations'. Language Resources and Evaluation 2019. Available online at DOI: 10.1007/s10579-018-9436-9
    Andrei Malchanau
    'Cognitive Architecture for Multimodal Multidimensional Dialogue Management.' PhD Thesis, University of Saarland, Saarbruecken 2019.

    Andrei Malchanau, Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    'Towards Integration of Cognitive Models in Dialogue Management: Designing the Virtual Negotiation Coach Application.' Dialogue and Discourse 9(2), 35-79, 2018. DOI: 10.5087/dad.2018.202.
    Alex Chengyu Fang, Yanjao Liu, Jing Cao and Harry Bunt
    'Chinese Multimodal Resources for DA Analysis.' In Chu-Ren Huang, Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, and Barbara Meisterernst (eds) The Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics, Chapter 17. Routledge, Oxford 2018.
    Harry Bunt, Emer Gilmartin, Catherine Pelachaud, Volha Petukhova, Laurent Prévot and Mariet Theune (2018)
    Downward Compatible Revision of Dialogue Act Annotation.
    In Proceedings 14th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-14), Santa Fé, New Mexico, pp. 21-34.

    Volha Petukhova, Andrei Malchanau and Harry Bunt
    'Modelling argumentation in parliamentary debates: data collection, analysis and test case'. In Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Floris Bex, The Duy Bui, Floriana Grasso, Nancy Green, Mohammad Namazi, Masayuki Numao, Mercedes Rodrigo, Merlin Teodosia Suarez (eds.) Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer, Berlin, 2017, pages 26-46.
    James Pustejovsky, Harry Bunt and Annie Zaenen
    'Designing Annotation Schemes: From Theory to Model.' In Nancy Ide and James Pustejovsky (eds): Handbook of Linguistic Annotation, Springer, Berlin, 2017.
    Simon Keizer and Verena Rieser
    'Towards Learning Transferable Conversational Skills using Multi-dimensional Dialogue Modelling.' In Proceedings 21st Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial/SaarDial), Saarbrucken 2017.

    Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, David Traum and Jan Alexandersson
    'Dialogue Acts Annotation with the ISO 24617-2 Standard'. In Deborah Dahl (ed.) Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Towards Natural User Interfaces to Everythhing.Springer, Berlin, pp. 109-135.

    Andrei Malchanau, Volha Petukhova, Harry Bunt and Dietrich Klakow
    'Multidimensional dialogue management for tutoring systems.'' In Proceedings of the 7th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2015), Poznan, Poland.
    Harry Bunt
    'On the principles of semantic annotation.' Proceedings 11th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation, London, April 2015, pp. 1-13.
    Volha Petukhova, Harry Bunt and Andrei Malchanau and Ramkumar Aruchamy
    'Experimenting with grounding strategies in dialogue'. Proceedings of GoDial, The 19th International Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SEMDIAL 2015), Gothenburg, August 2015.

    Harry Bunt
    'A context-change semantics for dialogue acts'. In Computing Meaning, Vol. 4, Harry Bunt, Johan Bos and Stephen Pulman, editors. Springer, Dordrecht 2014.
    Harry Bunt and Volha Petukhova
    'Incremental Recognition and Prediction of Dialogue Acts'. In Computing Meaning, Vol. 4, Harry Bunt, Johan Bos and Stephen Pulman, editors. Springer, Dordrecht, 2014.

    Harry Bunt
    'A methodology for designing semantic annotations'. TiCC Technical Report 2013-001, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication and Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University, 2013.

    Harry Bunt
    'The semantics of feedback.' In Proceedings of SeineDial, the 2012 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Paris, September 2012.

    Harry Bunt
    'Multifunctionality in dialogue.' Computer, Speech and Language 25 (2011), 225-245.
    Harry Bunt
    'The semantics of dialogue acts'. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-9), Oxford, January 12-14, 2011, pp. 1-13.
    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    'Incremental dialogue act understanding'. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-9), Oxford, January 12-14, 2011.
    Keizer, S., H. Bunt and V. Petukhova (2011)
    Multidimensional dialogue management. In A. van den Bosch and G. Bouma (eds.) Interactive Multimodal Question Answering. Berlin: Springer, pp. 57-86.

    Harry Bunt and Volha Petukhova
    'On the many benefits of a multidimensional approach to the analysis of spoken dialogue.' In Peter Juel Henrichsen (ed.) Linguistic Theory and Raw Sound. Copenhagen Studies in Language 40, 209-250.

    Harry Bunt, Jan Alexandersson, Jean Carletta, Jae-Woong Choe, Alex Chengyu Fang, Koiti Hasida, Kyong Lee, Volha Petukhova, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Laurent Romary, Claudia Soria, and David Traum
    `Towards an ISO standard for dialogue act annotation' In Proceedings of LREC 2010, the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Malta, May 16-23, 2010.
    Harry Bunt
    'Interpetation and generation of dialogue with multidimensional context models.' In Anna Esposito (ed.) Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces. Springer, Berlin, pp. 214-242. See also online version.
    Harry Bunt
    `A methodology for designing semantic annotation languages exploiting syntactic-semantic iso-morphisms.' In Proceedings of ICGL 2010, Second International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources, Hong Kong, 18-20 January 2010.
    Volha Petukhova, Harry Bunt, and Andrei Malchanau
    'Empirical and theoretical constraints on dialogue act combinaations'. In Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (PozDial), Poznan, June 16-18, 2010.
    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    'Introducing communicative function qualifiers.' In Proceedings of ICGL 2010, Second International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources, Hong Kong, January 2010.

    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    'Grounding by nodding.' In Proceedings of GESPIN 2009, Conference on Gestures and Speech in Interaction, Poznan, September 2009.
    Harry Bunt
    `Multifunctionality and multidimensional dialogue semantics'. In Proceedings of DiaHolmia 2009, (invited talk), Stockholm, June 2009.
    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    'Who's next? Speaker-selection mechanisms in multiparty dialogue'. In Proceedings of DiaHolmia 2009, 8th Internal Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Stockholm, June 2009.
    Harry Bunt
    'The DIT++ taxonomy for functional dialogue markup'. In Proceedings of the AAMAS 2009 Workshop "Towards a Standard Markup Language for Embodied Dialogue Acts" (EDAML 2009), Dirk Heylen, Catherine Pelachaud, Roberta Catizone, and David Traum, editors, Budapest, May 12, 2009.
    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    'The independence of dimensions in multidimensional dialogue act annotation'. tab In Proceedings of the NAACL 2009 conference, Boulder, Colorado, June 2009.
    Harry Bunt
    'Semantic Annotations as Complimentary to Underspecified Semantic Representations'. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-8), Tilburg, January 7-9, 2009.
    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    'Towards a multidimensional semantics for discourse markers'. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-8), Tilburg, January 7-9,2009
    Harry Bunt and Chwhynny Overbeeke
    `An Extensible, Compositional Semantics of Temporal Annotation.' In Proceedings of LAW-II, the Second Linguistic Annotation Workshop, Marrakech, Morocco, May 26-27, 2008.
    Jeroen Geertzen, Volha Petukhova, and Harry Bunt
    `Evaluating Dialogue Act Tagging with Naive and Expert Annotators.' In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco, May 28-30, 2008.
    Harry Bunt and Chwhynny Overbeeke
    `Towards formal interpretation of semantic annotation.' In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco, May 28-30, 2008.
    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    `LIRICS semantic role annotation: design and evaluation of a set of data categories.' In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco, May 28-30, 2008.
    Harry Bunt
    `The Semantics of Semantic Annotation.' Invited paper presented at PACLIC-21, the 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Compuation, Seoul, Korea, November 2,. 2007. In (ed.) Proceedings of PACLIC-21, the 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Compuation, Seoul, Korea, November 1-3, 2007.
    Harry Bunt
    `Multifunctionality and Multidimensional Dialogue Act Annotation.' In E. Ahlsen et al. (ed.) Communication - Action - Meaning, A Festschrift to Jens Allwood. Gothenburg University Press, August 2007, pp. 237 -- 259.
    Harry Bunt and Roser Morante
    `The Weakest Link.' In V. Matousek and P. Mautner (2007) (eds.) Text, Speech and Dialogue. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) 4629, Springer, Berlin.
    Harry Bunt, Roser Morante, Simon Keizer
    `An empirically based computational model of grounding in dialogue.' In Proceedings of the Eighth SIGDIAL Conference on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2007). Antwerp, 1-2 September, 2007, pp. 283-290.
    Jeroen Geertzen, Volha Petukhova, and Harry Bunt
    `A multidimensional approach to utterance segmentation and dilaogue act classification.' In Proceedings of the Eighth SIGDIAL Conference on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2007). Antwerp, 1-2 September, 2007, pp. 140-149.
    Roser Morante, Simon Keizer and Harry Bunt
    `Dialogue simulation and context dynamics for dialogue management.' In J. Nivre, H.-J. Kaalep, K. Muischnek, and M. Keit (eds) Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2007). Tartu, Estonia, pp. 310-317.
    Simon Keizer and Harry Bunt
    `Evaluating combinations of dialogue acts'. In Proceedings of the Eighth SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2007), Antwerp, September, 2007, pp. 158-165.
    Roser Morante, Simon Keizer and Harry Bunt
    `A dialogue act based model for context updating.' In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DECALOG 2007). Trento, 30 May - 3 July, 2007, pp. 9-16.
    Harry Bunt and Amanda Schiffrin
    `Interoperable concepts for dialogue act annotation.' In Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-7). Tilburg, January 10-12, 2007, pp. 16-27.
    Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
    `A Multidimensional Approach to Multimodal Dialogue Act Annotation.' In Proceedings Seventh International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-7). Tilburg, January 10-12, 2007, pp. 142-153.
    Volha Petukhova, Harry Bunt and Amanda Schiffrin
    `Defining Semantic Roles.' In Proceedings Seventh International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-7). Tilburg, January 10-12, 2007, pp. 362-365.
    Jeroen Geertzen and Harry Bunt
    `Measuring annotator agreement in a complex hierarchical dialogue act scheme'. In Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2006, Sydney, July 15-16, 2006.
    Simon Keizer and Harry Bunt
    `Multidimensional dialogue management'. In Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2006, Sydney, July 15-16, 2006.
    Harry Bunt
    'Dimensions in Dialogue Act Annotation'. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006). Genova, Italy, May 24-26, 2006.
    Harry Bunt and Amanda Schiffrin
    `Methodologial aspects of semantic annotation'. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006). Genova, Italy, May 24-26, 2006.
    Jacques Terken, Hans van Dam and Harry Bunt
    `Cooperative assistance for human-system interaction'. In Proceedings of the 16th World Conference on Ergonomics (IEA2006), Maastricht, July 10-14, 2006.
    Harry Bunt
    `Mass Terms'. In Keith Brown (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 5757-5760.
    Rieks op den Akker, Harry Bunt, Simon Keizer and Boris van Schooten
    `From Question Answering to Spoken Dialogue: Towards an Information Search Assistant for Interactive Multimodal Information Extraction'. In Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, September 2005, pp. 2793-2797.
    Harry Bunt and Yann Girard
    `Designing an Open, Multidimensional Dialogue Act Taxonomy'. In Claire Gardent & Bertrand Gaiffe (eds) DIALOR'05, Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. Nancy, June 9-11, 2005.
    Harry Bunt
    `A Framework for Dialogue Act Specification'.Paper presented at ISO_SIGSEM workshop Tilburg, January 10-11, 2005.
    Harry Bunt, Michael Kipp, Mark Maybury and Wolfgang Wahlster
    `Fusion and Coordination for Multimodal Interactive Information Presentation'. In: O. Stock and M. Zancanaro (eds) Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation. Springer, Dordrecht 2005, pp. 325-339.
    Harry Bunt and Laurent Romary
    `Standardization in Multimodal Content Representation: Some Methodological Issues'.In: Proceedings of LREC 2004, Lisbon, Portugal, May 2004, pp. 2219-2222.
    Harry Bunt and Laurent Romary
    `Towards multimodal semantic representation'.In: Key-Sun Choi (ed.) Proceedings of LREC 2002 Workshop on International Standards of Terminology and Language Resourses Management, Las Palmas, Spain, 29 May 2002. ELRA, Paris, pp. 54-60.
    Leen Kievit, Paul Piwek, Robbert-Jan Beun and Harry Bunt
    `Multimodal Cooperative Resolution of Referential Expressions in the DenK System.'(pdf file).
    (Postscript file). In: H.C. Bunt & R.J. Beun (eds.) Cooperative Multimodal Communication , Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2155, Springer Verlag, Berlin, forthcoming October 2001, pp. 197-214.
    Harry Bunt
    `Dialogue pragmatics and context specification.'(ps file); `Dialogue pragmatics and context specification.'(pdf file). In: Harry Bunt and William Black (eds) Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue. Studies in Computational Pragmatics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2000, Series Natural Language Processing, Volume 1, pp. 81-150.
    Harry Bunt and Willam Black
    `The ABC of Computational Pragmatics.'. In: Harry Bunt and William Black (eds) Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue. Studies in Computational Pragmatics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2000, Series Natural Language Processing, Volume 1, pp. 1-46.
    Harry Bunt
    `Non-problems and social obligations in human-computer conversation'. In: Proceedings Third International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation, Bellagio (Italy), July 2000.
    Harry Bunt, Rene Ahn, Robbert-Jan Beun, Teun Borghuis, & Cees van Overveld
    `The DenK architecture: a pragmatic approach to user interfaces.' Artificial Intelligence Review 8 (3), 1995, 431-445.
    Harry Bunt, Rene Ahn, Robbert-Jan Beun, Teun Borghuis, & Cees van Overveld
    `Multimodal Cooperation with the DenK System.' (postscript file) In: H.C. Bunt, R.J. Beun & T. Borghuis (eds.) Multimodal Human-Computer Communication. Sytems, Techniques and Experiments. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1374, Springer Verlag, Berlin, pp. 39-67.
    Harry Bunt
    `Dynamic Interpretation and Dialogue Theory'. In: M.M. Taylor, D.G. Bouwhuis & F. Neel (eds.) The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue, Vol 2., Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000, pp 139-166.
    Harry Bunt
    `Dialogue control functions and interaction design'. In: R.J. Beun, M. Baker & M. Reiner (eds.) Dialogue in Instruction. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, 1995, pp. 197 -- 214.
    Harry Bunt
    `Interaction management functions and context representation requirements'. In: S. LuperFoy, A. Nijholt, & G. Veldhuizen van Zanten (eds.) Dialogue Management in Nateral Language Systems. Proc. of 11th Twente Workshop on Language Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, June 1996, pp. 187 -- 198.
    Harry Bunt
    Context and Dialogue Control. Think Quarterly 3(1), 19-31.
    Harry Bunt
    `Belief Contexts in Human-Computer Dialogue'. In: D. Nauta, A. Nijholt & J. Schaake (eds.) Pragmatics in Language Technology. Proc. of 4th Twente Workshop on Language Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, June 1992, pp. 106 -- 114.
    Harry Bunt
    Information Dialogues as Communicative Action in Relation to User Modelling and Information Processing. In: M.M. Taylor, D.G. Bouwhuis & F. Neel (eds.) The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue, Vol. 1, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1989, pp. 47-74.

    Other references:

    Bunt (2019) An annotation scheme for quantification. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019), Gothenburg, Sweden.

    Bunt, H. (2018) Semantic Annotation of Quantification in Natural Language -- preparatory study for developing an ISO standard TiCC Technical Report 2018-15, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication and Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University.

    Bunt, H., J. Pustejovsky and K. Lee (2018) Towards an ISO Standard for the Annotation of Quantification. In Proceedings 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018.

    Burkhardt, F., Pelachaud, C., Schuller, Bj., and Zovato, E. (2017) EmotionML. In D. Dahl (ed.) Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards. Springer, Cham (Switzerland), pp. 65-80.

    Ekman, P. (1972). Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion. In J. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 19, pp.207-282). University of Nebraska Press.

    Different in release 5.1 from previous release (release 4, February 2010)

    DIT++ release 5.1 offers the same coverage as release 4, and is fully compatible with it: annotations using release 4 are easily converted into annotations using release 5.1 and vice versa. The changes (improvements!) have been inspired by the fact that the DIT++ taxonomy has been the basis for the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation. In the course of defining the ISO standard proposal, some points were noted where the DIT++ taxonomy (release 4) could be improved. The most important of these improvements are the introduction of (1) communicative function qualifiers; and (2) rhetorical relations among dialogue acts.






    Last modified: Tue Jan 19 15:32:52 CET 2021
    <harry.bunt@uvt.nl>