Dialogue acts in VERBMOBIL

Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde im Rahmen des Verbundvorhabens Verbmobil vom Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF), unter dem Förderkennzeichen 01 IV 101 K / 1 gefördert. Die Verantwortung für den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei den AutorInnen.In the first phase of the VERBMOBIL project (’93-’94) several project partners worked on different aspects of dialogue acts. In Spring ‘94 a meeting was held, in which dialogue acts were discussed in detail and a common terminology was proposed (see [7] for a presentation of these results). For several reasons, which we will discuss in more detail below, a «restandardization» of the dialogue acts to be used in VERBMOBIL became necessary, however. In order to achieve such a restandardization, it was decided to organize a small meeting, in which all groups working with dialogue acts would be represented. The main part of this report contains detailed descriptions of the dialogue acts agreed upon during this meeting, thereby updating the presentations in [7] and [14]. To put our general understanding of dialogue acts into perspective, we also describe briefly the general context of VERBMOBIL and the different uses of dialogue acts in the VERBMOBIL system. In doing so we refer the interested readers to the respective publications which describe these applications in more detail