Abstract
Current models of dialogue mainly focus on utterances within a topically coherent discourse segment, rather than new-topic utterances (NTUs), which begin a new topic not correlating with the content of prior discourse. As a result, these models may sufficiently account for discourse context of task-oriented but not social conversations. We conduct a pilot annotation study of NTUs as a first step towards a model capable of rationalizing conversational coherence in social talk. We start with the naturally occurring social dialogues in the Disco-SPICE corpus, annotated with discourse relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank and Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations frameworks. We first annotate content-based coherence relations that are not available in Disco-SPICE, and then heuristically identify NTUs, which lack a coherence relation to prior discourse. Based on the interaction between NTUs and their discourse context, we construct a classification for NTUs that actually convey certain non-topical coherence in social talk. This classification introduces new sequence-based social intents that traditional taxonomies of speech acts do not capture. The new findings advocates the development of a Bayesian game-theoretic model for social talk.
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundSocial talk or casual conversation, one of the most popular instances of spontaneous discourse, is commonly defined as the speech event type in which “all participants have the same role: to be “equals;” no purposes are pre-established; and the range of possible topics is open-ended, conventionally constrained” (Scha et al, 1986)
To account for conversational coherence, current models2 of dialogue mainly focus on utterances within a topically coherent discourse segment, rather than new-topic utterances (NTUs), which begin a new topic not linguistically3 correlating with the content of prior discourse
We present a pilot annotation study13 as a first step towards a dialogue model which is capable of rationalizing NTUs and conversational coherence in social talk
Summary
Social talk or casual conversation, one of the most popular instances of spontaneous discourse, is commonly defined as the speech event type in which “all participants have the same role: to be “equals;” no purposes are pre-established; and the range of possible topics is open-ended, conventionally constrained” (Scha et al, 1986). Even though we do not establish any purposes in terms of information exchange or practical tasks, we do share certain social goal from the back of our mind when deciding to engage in a casual conversation. A similar assumption is made in Grosz and Sidner (1986)’s discourse structure framework as it affirms the primary role of speakers’ intentions in “explaining discourse structure, defining discourse coherence, and providing a coherent conceptualization of the term “discourse” itself.”.
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