Semantic annotation of the French media dialog corpus

The French Technolangue MEDIA-EVALDA project aims to evaluate spoken understanding approaches. This paper describes the semantic annotation scheme of a common dialog corpus which will be used for developing and evaluating spoken understanding models and for linguistic studies. A common semantic representation has been formalized and agreed upon by the consortium. Each utterance is divided into semantic segments and each segment is annotated with a 5-tuplet containing the mode, attribute name representing the underlying concept, normalized form of the attribute, list of related segments, and an optional comment about the annotation. Periodic interannotator agreement studies demonstrate that the annotation are of good quality, with an agreement of almost 90% on mode and attribute identification. An analysis of the semantic content of 12292 annotated client utterances shows that only 14.1% of the observed attributes are domain-dependent and that the semantic dictionary ensures a good coverage of the task.