Split utterances in dialogue: a corpus study

Authors:
Matthew Purver;Christine Howes;Patrick G. T. Healey;Eleni Gregoromichelaki
Affiliations:
Queen Mary University of London, London, UK;Queen Mary University of London, London, UK;Queen Mary University of London, London, UK;King's College London, Strand, London, UK
Venue:
SIGDIAL '09 Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference: The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Year:
2009

Citing 2
Cited 5

Assessing agreement on classification tasks: the kappa statistic

Computational Linguistics
Incremental dialogue processing in a micro-domain

EACL '09 Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

A: an experimental investigation into...: B: ... split utterances

SIGDIAL '09 Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference: The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Collaborating on utterances with a spoken dialogue system using an ISU-based approach to incremental dialogue management

SIGDIAL '10 Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Natural-language syntax as procedures for interpretation: the dynamics of ellipsis construal

Ludics, dialogue and interaction
Modelling context-dependence: ellipsis in conversational dialogue

CONTEXT'11 Proceedings of the 7th international and interdisciplinary conference on Modeling and using context
Predicting the micro-timing of user input for an incremental spoken dialogue system that completes a user's ongoing turn

SIGDIAL '11 Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2011 Conference

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary English corpus study of split utterances (SUs), single utterances split between two or more dialogue turns or speakers. It has been suggested that SUs are a key phenomenon of dialogue, which this study confirms: almost 20% of utterances were found to fit this general definition, with nearly 3% being the between-speaker case most often studied. Other claims/assumptions in the literature about SUs' form and distribution are investigated, with preliminary results showing: splits can occur within syntactic constituents, apparently at any point in the string; it is unusual for the separate parts to be complete units in their own right; explicit repair of the antecedent does not occur very often. The theoretical consequences of these results for claims in the literature are pointed out. The practical implications for dialogue systems are mentioned too.