Applied Linguistics (Yuyan Wenzi Yingyong)

Abstract

The term “dialogue act” refers to the speaker’s intention in conversation. Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in developing automatic systems for understanding spontaneous conversation. The task of building a typology for dialogue acts, therefore, has been recognized as one of the most essential stepping stones. In line with the above studies, the present paper proposes a typology for dialogue acts in news interviews, which aims to establish a framework of dialogue acts for natural language processing. We start our work by reviewing the concept of dialogue act and four existing tagsets. Then, based on the close study of spontaneous conversations, a new typology of dialogue acts is proposed. Meanwhile, the distinctive linguistic features of these dialogue acts are described and illustrated with the goal of examining what kinds of information are useful for automatic dialogue act tagging. The taxonomy adopted in the present scheme follows the general principles of other typologies but differs in the identification of some specific dialogue acts. Finally, the potential applications, as well as the reliability of the tagsets, are discussed.

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