Coding Dialogs with the DAMSL Annotation Scheme

This paper describes the DAMSL annotation scheme for communicative acts in dialog The scheme has three layers Forward Communicative Functions Backward Communicative Functions and Utterance Features Each layer allows multiple communicative functions of an utterance to be labeled The Forward Communicative Functions consist of a taxonomy in a similar style as the actions of traditional speech act theory The Backward Communicative Functions indi cate how the current utterance relates to the previous dialog such as accepting a proposal con rming under standing or answering a question The Utterance Fea tures include information about an utterance s form and content such as whether an utterance concerns the communication process itself or deals with the subject at hand The kappa inter annotator reliability scores for the rst test of DAMSL with human annota tors show promise but are on average lower than the accepted kappa scores for such annotations How ever the slight revisions to DAMSL discussed here should increase accuracy on the next set of tests and produce a reliable exible and comprehensive utter ance annotation scheme