Kepa Joseba Rodríguez

Standoff Coordination for Multi-Tool Annotation in a Dialogue Corpus

The LUNA corpus is a multi-lingual, multi-domain spoken dialogue corpus currently under development that will be used to develop a robust natural spoken language understanding toolkit for multilingual dialogue services. The LUNA corpus will be annotated at multiple levels to include annotations of syntactic, semantic, and discourse information; specialized annotation tools will be used for the annotation at each of these levels. In order to synchronize these multiple layers of annotation, the PAULA standoff exchange format will be used. In this paper, we present the corpus and its PAULA-based architecture.

Producing contextually appropriate intonation in an information-state based dialogue system

Our goal is to improve the contextual appropriateness of spoken output in a dialogue system. We explore the use of the information state to determine the information structure of system utterances. We concentrate on the realization of information structure by intonation. We present the results of evaluating the contextual appropriateness of varied system output produced with a text-to-speech synthesis system that supports intonation annotation.

A dialogue system with contextually appropriate spoken output intonation

We demonstrate the production of spoken output with contextually appropriate intonation in the information-state based dialogue system GoDiS. We exploit the context representation in the information state to determine the information structure of system utterances, which we use to control the intonation of synthesized spoken output.

Annotated Corpora and Annotation Tools

In this chapter we review the currently available corpora to study anaphoric interpretation, and the tools that can be used to create new ones. A comprehensive survey of annotated corpora will be given, which ranges from the corpora and guidelines developed for the Message Understanding Conferences MUC-6 (1996) and MUC-7 (1998), which have been seminal to the field, to the resources that have been recently made available as part of the 2010 SemEval evaluation campaign. All fundamental design decisions regarding annotation formats and standards are described, and the relevant properties of the corpora are presented in a uniform and well-structured way. Moreover, three useful, widely used and freely available annotation tools (CALLISTO, MMAX2, and Palinka) will be described. They can be employed if own annotation work turns out to be indispensable.