Discourse marker use in task-oriented spoken dialog \lambda

Discourse markers, also known as clue words, are used extensively in human-human task-oriented dialogs to signal the structure of the discourse. Previous work showed their importance in monologs and social conversations for marking discourse structure, but little attention has been paid to their importance in spoken dialog systems. This paper investigates what discourse markers signal about the upcoming speech, and when they tend to be used in task-oriented dialog. We demonstrate that there is a high correlation between specific discourse markers and specific conversational moves, between discourse marker use and adjacency pairs, and between discourse markers and the speaker''s orientation to information presented in the prior turn. We limit our analysis to turn-initial discourse markers and discover new patterns in their interaction with phenomena specific to dialog.

[1]  E. Schegloff,et al.  Opening up Closings , 1973 .

[2]  Bonnie L. Webber,et al.  Expectations in Incremental Discourse Processing , 1997, ACL.

[3]  Anita M. Pomerantz.  Second assessments : a study of some features of agreements/disagreements , 1975 .

[4]  Rachel Reichman,et al.  Getting computers to talk like you and me , 1985 .

[5]  Deborah Schiffrin,et al.  CONVERSATIONAL COHERENCE: THE ROLE OF WELL , 1985 .

[6]  Robin Cohen,et al.  A Computational Theory of the Function of Clue Words in Argument Understanding , 1984, ACL.

[7]  David R. Traum,et al.  Utterance Units in Spoken Dialogue , 1996, ECAI Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems.

[8]  D. Schiffrin.  Discourse markers: Temporal adverbs: now and then , 1987 .

[9]  David R. Traum,et al.  Utterance units and grounding in spoken dialogue , 1996, Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96.

[10]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  Using Discourse Analysis and Automatic Text Generation to Study Discourse Cue Usage , 1995 .

[11]  J. Atkinson,et al.  A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement , 1985 .

[12]  Daniel Marcu.  The rhetorical parsing of natural language texts , 1997 .

[13]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases , 1993, Comput. Linguistics.

[14]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse , 1986, CL.

[15]  Rachel Reichman,et al.  Plain Speaking: A Theory and Grammar of Spontaneous Discourse. , 1981 .

[16]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  Learning Features that Predict Cue Usage , 1997, ACL.

[17]  Herbert H. Clark,et al.  Contributing to Discourse , 1989, Cogn. Sci..