Annotation and Classification of French Feedback Communicative Functions

Laurent Prevot (1) , Jan Gorish (1) , Sankar Mukherjee (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

Feedback utterances are among the most fre- quent in dialogue. Feedback is also a crucial aspect of all linguistic theories that take social interaction involving language into account. However, determining communicative func- tions is a notoriously difficult task both for human interpreters and systems. It involves an interpretative process that integrates vari- ous sources of information. Existing work on communicative function classification comes from either dialogue act tagging where it is generally coarse grained concerning the feed- back phenomena or it is token-based and does not address the variety of forms that feed- back utterances can take. This paper intro- duces an annotation framework, the dataset and the related annotation campaign (involv- ing 7 raters to annotate nearly 6000 utter- ances). We present its evaluation not merely in terms of inter-rater agreement but also in terms of usability of the resulting reference dataset both from a linguistic research per- spective and from a more applicative view- point.

Keywords: Dialogue; Feedback; French

Domains: Cognitive science; Linguistics

Laurent Prevot, Jan Gorish, Sankar Mukherjee. Annotation and Classification of French Feedback Communicative Functions. The 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Oct 2015, ShangHai, China. ⟨hal-01227890⟩