Paradigms, Corpora, and Tools in Discourse and Dialog Research Panel at SIGDial 2003 Janyce Wiebe University of Pittsburgh

Pragmatic Aspects of Discourse and Dialog Attitude and affect (subjectivity, emotion, opinion, …) Time (tense, aspect, temporal coherence) Style Now that work on discourse and dialog is more mature, it’s important to focus more on pragmatic aspects such as these, and not just on the topic or task of the discourse. There is an increasing amount of recent work in these areas, especially the first two. I’m going to focus on the first one since that’s my current focus.

Attitude and Affect in Discourse Question answering systems should distinguish between factual and speculative answers Multi-perspective QA aims to present multiple answers based on opinions from various sources Multi-document summaries should summarize multiple views “Camps” in on-line discussions and finding reviews Adapting dialog managers when problematic emotions in task-oriented dialogs Adapting pedagogical strategy when positive or negative emotions in tutorial systems Many NLP applications in which discourse is important could benefit from being able to analyze and generate attitude and affect in discourse. An important aspect of the discourse structure of on-line discussions are the “camps” people fall into discussions of pros and cons of various things There is also recent work in emotion and dialog strategy.

Annotation and Corpora Corpus annotated for subjectivity (emotions, evaluations, speculations) in text Recent work annotating emotions in dialog Synergy between text and dialog Research direction: integrating work in the two modalities So we have our corpus annotated for subjectivity in text, which theresa described in her talk. As she described, this type of annotation can be done with good agreement People have started to annotation emotions in speech, to support emotion detection and its impact on dialog management We feel there is synergy between these aspects of text discourse and dialog integrating work is a research direction. Hopefully people would benefit from building on what we’ve done

Example meeting transcript m053_6_0097_COU_00: • hm . • <P> I remember that , <P> reading about that . m053_5_0098_ZMW_00: • so , it is so easy to get new people ? • f= <*T>t m053_4_0099_MTY_00: • no , it is not , but you know , I mean . • <B> -/I think if/- <uh> <P> yeah , so would happen if the airline pilots threatened to strike ? • <B> I think the consumers would be more angry than the +/airliners/+ +/a=/+ airlines , you know . • and <uh> +/the/+ the people simply would not listen when the pilots would say , look , we're doing this for you . • <P> <uh> the% public would say , get back to work , you slackers , you know . I won’t go into this, but theresa did a pilot study in annotating subjectivity in meeting dialog data. This does seem to be a promising area.

Examples “They have to be so middle of the road , that they have to look like a stripe.” subjective “I'm gonna minimize this.” objective Example of a simple subjective utterance Example of a simple objective utterance Both of these sentences are from the meeting data used for this project.

Sample References: Subjectivity Analysis Agrawal et al. (WWW03) Gordon et al. (ACL03) Hong, Hatzivassiloglou, McKeown (ACL97, EMNLP03) Pang et al. (EMNLP02) Riloff, Wiebe, Wilson (EMNLP03,CoNLL03,SIGdial03) Spertus (IAAI97) Tong (SIGIR01 workshop) Turney (ACL02) Wiebe et al. (ACL88 … ARDA AQUAINT NRRC 2002) Subjectivity analysis in text

Sample References: Emotion in Dialog Aist et al. (ITS02) Ang et al. (ICSLP02) Batliner et al. (ISCA00 workshop) Craggs and Wood (SIGdial03) Iwahashi (SIGdial03) Litman, Forbes, Silliman (HLT-NAACL03) Litman, Hirschberg, Swerts (ACL01) Narayanan (ISLE02) The Iwahashi is on mutual belief in dialog. I include it here because it is in SIGdial.