Representational issues in annotation: Using the Australian map task corpus to relate prosody and discourse structure

Abstract

This paper reports part of an ongoing investigation of the interaction of prosody and discourse structure. A digital speech corpus (4 dialogues from the ANDOSL Australian map task corpus) was coded for prosodic structure (ToBI). Independently, two different coding systems for dialogue micro-structure were applied to the same corpus: the HCRC map task coding scheme (Carletta et al., 1996, 1997b) and the `Switchboard' version of the DRI/DAMSL scheme (Jurafsky et al., 1997). We investigated whether silent pause location and duration, intonational boundaries associated with Break Indices 3 and 4, as well as pitch range reset were significantly correlated with dialogue act boundaries as has been found for other varieties of English (e.g., Lehiste, 1975; Hirschberg and Nakatani, 1996; Silverman, 1987) and Dutch (Swerts, 1997). The dialogue coding systems were systematically evaluated both against one another and in terms of their correlation with the prosodic structure. The paper explores a number of methodological issues which arise in effectively comparing and relating structures from different domains of analysis across a large speech corpus. It also exemplifies the way in which annotated corpora can be used to evaluate theories and systems.