An empirical study of acknowledgment structures

The subject of our study is one type of "response" in dialogue, usually called acknowledgment or positive feedback. We show here how distinguishing between different acknowledgments is central to the establishment of information. The study is based on a french corpus of direction-giving dialogues which we have gathered. The factors that we investigate about the acknowledgments are their producer, their target and their scope. We focus on the relations between those features and linguistic discourse markers

Audio synchronisation with a tunnel matrix for time series and dynamic programming

International audiencePrecise multimodal studies require precise synchronisation between audio and video signals. However, raw audio and audio from video recordings can be out of sync for several reasons. In order to re-synchronise them, a dynamic programming (DP) approach is presented here. Traditionally, DP is performed on the rectangular distance matrix comparing each value in signal A with each value in signal B. Previous work limited the search space using for example the Sakoe Chiba Band (Sakoe and Chiba, 1978). However, the overall space of the distance matrix remains identical. Here, a tunnel matrixand its according DP-algorithm are presented. The matrix contains merely the computed distance of two signals to a pre-specified bandwidth and the computational cost is equally reduced. An example implementation demonstrates the functionality on artificial data and on data from real audio andvideo recordings

On the compositionality of temporal locating adverbial modification

International audienceSemantic puzzles raised by temporal locating adverbials have been less focused on than those involving temporal quanti cational or duration adverbials. But these adverbials, whose semantics amounts to the location of a single eventuality with respect to a time or another eventuality, are involved in phenomena apparently jeopardizing the compositionality of adverbial modification. In this paper, we focus on French data for which we propose an account in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. The compositionality issue we are interested in here appears for our approach to locating adverbials, which assumes that the location relation is contributed by the adverbial itself. This is against the standard view which assumes that the adverbial simply qualifies a temporal referent systematically introduced along with the location relation by the tense. Our approach assumes a unique semantics for the adverbials and the tenses, and acknowledges the contribution of IP-level composition in discourse representation construction

The Discourse Function of Final Rises in French dialogues

We report the results of an empirical study which aims to describe the discourse function of rises at right edge intonation boundaries in French. A Map-Task corpus containing two dialogues was annotated for IP boundaries and pitch transition points with the INTSINT intonational alphabet. The transcripts of the dialogues were labeled for dialogue structure and dialogue acts, using form and function tags. The relation between rises at IP boundaries with types of dialogue acts and topic shifts was statistically evaluated. As expected, the results show a positive correlation between rises and polar questions and between rises and discourse topic openings. Interestingly, the second correlation was stronger than the first, suggesting that the association of rises with topic openings is not simply due to the effect of questions as introducing new topics

Annotation and Classification of French Feedback Communicative Functions

International audienceFeedback 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

Should we use movie subtitles to study linguistic patterns of conversational speech? A study based on French, English and Taiwan Mandarin

International audienceLinguistic research benefits from the wide range of resources and software tools developed for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, NLP has a strong historical bias towards written language, thereby making these resources and tools often inadequate to address research questions related to the linguistic patterns of spontaneous speech. In this preliminary study, we investigate whether corpora of movie and TV subtitles can be employed to estimate data-driven NLP models adapted to conversational speech. In particular, the presented work explore lexical and syntactic distributional aspects across three genres (conversational, written and subtitles) and three languages (French, English and Taiwan Mandarin). Ongoing work focuses on comparing these three genres on the basis of deeper syntactic conversational patterns , using graph-based modelling and visualisation

Quelle(s) relation(s) de discours pour les structures énumératives ?

International audienceLes structures énumératives, que nous nous proposons d'étudier dans cet article, sont des structures hiérarchiques au plan textuel et sont fréquemment associées à des marques de surface typo- dispositionnelles. Notre étude vise à explorer la contribution d'une source d'information quelque peu négligée (même si nous n'étudierons pas directement les marques typo-dispositionnelles) à l'établissement de la cohérence discursive, et plus particulièrement la contribution de cette source d'information au repérage de la relation d'Elaboration, une tâche notoirement difficile

Interleaved discourse, the case of two-step enumerative structures

Right Frontier Constraint (RFC) is a principle widely used across discourse theories because it manages to explain a wide variety of discourse phenomena. However, interleaved structures, described for example in (Asher, 1993), seem to constitute a problem for the standard version of this principle. These constructions have been described as allowing discourse attachment to closed off constituents contrarily to RFC predictions. We aim at proposing a treatment of two-step enumerative structures (Porhiel, 2007) based on some recent contributions on enumerative structures (Bras et al., 2008). We take this specific structure as an entry point for more general interleaved constructions that constitute a crucial challenge for discourse structure theories