Discourse and Interaction in French conversations, a case study for Interoperable Semantic Annotation

In this paper, we propose a partial framework for annotating conversation with discourse and interaction information. We focus discourse coherence, reported speech and humor that are not included in most of existing dialogue annotation frameworks. These phenomena are ubiquitous in our conversational but their analysis seems necessary for all kind of communicative situations, including task-oriented dialogues. Due to their practical applications and their controlled extra-linguistic context task-oriented dialogues is the kind of linguistic interaction that received the more attention from computational and formal studies. The development of formal frameworks, including standardization considerations, is therefore fairly advanced for this kind of data. Everyday conversation on the other hand have received the attention of more descriptive studies. While these approaches made various advances in the study of these phenomena, they did not fully contribute to more formal modeling. The paper introduces our annotation schema and discuss potential contributions to the dialogue act annotation standard proposed by ISO TC37/4.