Homework for DRI Group on Forward and Backward-looking Functions

Participants in the group on forward and backward-looking functions will perform a homework to prepare themselves for meeting at the 3rd Discourse Resource Initiative (DRI) workshop at Chiba Univ./Kazusa Academic Park, Japan, May 1998.

DAMSL (Dialog Act Markup in Several Layers) is an annotation scheme for forward and backward-looking communicative functions being developed by DRI. The homework will involve annotating a few dialogs with DAMSL. To perform this annotation, you will need the DAMSL annotation manual, the dialog annotation tool (dat), the dialogs to be annotated, and descriptions of the domains to be annotated. The dialogs to be annotated are TRIPS dialog 971202.1238, Verbmobil dialog r148c, and Map Task dialog d204. Annotated versions of TRIPS and Verbmobil dialogs are DUE APRIL 27. The Map Task dialog is DUE MAY 1. Please try to finish them close to that time. Your dialogs will still be useful if sent after that but may not be included in the data taken to Chiba Univ./Kazusa Academic Park. Please email each annotated dat file separately to mcore@cs.rochester.edu when ready.

  • Here are the results of this homework so far

    A Note on Segmentation: the utterance units are prosodically motivated and may not comprise full sentences. For example, you may see a segmentation such as:

      utt1 take the people
      utt2 to Delta
      
    It might be hard to label "to Delta" by itself. You may consider utt1 and utt2 ("take the people to Delta") as one unit. To label "take the people to Delta" as, say, an Action Directive, tag utt1 as an Action Directive and utt2 as an Action Directive. It would be helpful if you included a comment that you think utt1 and utt2 should be joined.

    DAMSL Annotation Manual

  • Postscript version of Dialog Annotation Manual (Last Update 9/22/97)

  • HTML version of Dialog Annotation Manual (Last Update 9/22/97)

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    Dialog Annotation Tool (dat)

    Dat requires Perl 5.003 (or higher), the Perl Tk package, and the Perl FileDialog widget. We are currently running dat with Perl 5.004_04 and Perl Tk 402.003. The pointers below correspond to this setup. If you already have dat, you will need to download it again assuming that you installed it before September 23, 1997. However, you should not need to worry about Perl and Perl Tk. dat itself is quite small; the homework files are what take time to download. The README file included with dat gives instructions on how to (re)install dat.

  • dat (version 1.10), TRIPS dialog 971202.1238, Verbmobil dialog r148c, Map Task dialog d204, and their sound files. Note, these various dialogs are available separately (see below).

  • One location for Perl 5.004_04 (US Site)

  • One location for Perl Tk 402.003

  • Perl Tk FileDialog widget which you need for dat

    If the ftp locations above are slow try selecting an ftp site from here and downloading the ROADMAP file. This should allow you find what you are looking for. Check the Perl Home Page for more details.

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    Verbmobil Dialog r148c

  • Verbmobil dialog r148c and its sound files.

    Quick Intro

    The Verbmobil project is a long term effort to develop a mobile translation system for spontaneous speech in face-to-face situations. The current domain of focus is scheduling business meetings. To support this goal, some English human-human dialogs were collected in this domain. Dialog r148c is one of these dialogs. In r148c, the two speakers try to establish a time and place for a meeting. The speakers are in the same room and eye contact is allowed. The speakers are given calenders and instructions telling them when they are free and what meetings to plan. The speakers were instructed not to talk at the same time. They did not rehearse but they may have recorded other dialogs before this. The speakers are affiliated with a college of some kind as one speaker asks if they want to meet on campus or not and they mention a building called "Cyert Hall". The sound files provided correspond to turns (a continuous piece of text with the same speaker) so when playing an utterance's speech you will hear the whole turn.

    Note, at the end of the dialog there is an interesting exchange:

      utt32 A: see you then
      utt33 B: roger over and out
      utt34 A: thought it was roger wilcom
      utt35 B: oh no it is what we always say when we are talking on screen
      
    utt34 and utt35 are meta-comments about the task: How do we end the dialog/say goodbye? As to what "when we are talking on screen" means, B must be referring to being filmed. It seems unrelated to this face to face conversation.

  • Verbmobil Home Page
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    Map Task Dialog d204

  • Map Task dialog d204 and its soundfiles.

    Quick Intro

    The Map Task dialogs from which d204 was drawn were collected in Canada and consist of pairs of Canadian army reservists collaborating to solve a problem. Both reservists have a map but the maps are not identical in terms of the landmarks present. One participant is designated the direction giver, G and has a path marked on his map. The goal is for the other participant, the direction follower, F to trace this route on his map even though he can only communicate with G via speech; i.e., these are not face to face conversations. Note, due to the length of this dialog, not all of it is provided. The excerpt provided ends at the point when both participants have located a "dead tree" landmark on their maps.

  • Map for G: compressed Postscript | JPEG
  • Map for F: compressed Postscript | JPEG
  • Both

    JPEGs and html version of maps provided by David Traum.

    A Note on Overlapping Speech: the convention in the DAMSL manual is used here. Words of overlapping speech are marked with numbered square brackets with the number in parenthesis next to the right bracket. You can match up overlapping sections by finding all the bracketed text with the same index. Consider the two utterance units below. Here, ``assuming'' and ``okay'' are marked as overlapping since they are both are bracketed with number 1 brackets.

      T1 utt1: s: uh would take two hours  [ assuming ](1) you have
      |  |         an engine at Bath
      T2 utt2: u: [ okay ](1)
      

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    TRIPS Dialog 971202.1238

  • TRIPS dialog 971202.1238 and its sound files.

    Quick Intro

    This dialog consists of the interaction between TRIPS (The Rochester Interactive Planning System) computer program and a user. TRIPS collaborates with the user using both spoken dialogue and graphical displays to solve problems in a transportation logistics domain. Note, sound files are provided for the user's speech but not TRIPS' speech output. The problem addressed in this dialog is to evacuate people from an island (called Pacifica) by transporting them all to the city Delta where presumably they will be flown to safely. In utterances 5 and 11, the user asks for a map of the island as well as the location of the transports. The map at this point is shown below:

    The user first settles on a plan to get the people at Calypso to Delta and the people in Exodus to Delta. In utterance 29, truck one refers to the truck that has not moved yet. This truck picks up people in Barnacle and Abyss. Truck two is the one getting the people in Calypso. In utterance 39, the user alerts the system that the bridge to Delta is out and cannot be used in the plan. The system responds by highlighting the paths using the bridge. Part of the map at that point as shown below. Both trucks are using the bridge as shown by the light brown and pink paths. The red highlight flashes to alert the user. The user gets around the problem of the bridge and selects simulate plan from one of the menus (you should treat this as if the user had said "simulate the plan").

    Speech Recognition Errors

    The text corresponding to the user in the transcript is the output of the TRIPS speech recognizer. Speech recognition errors are marked in the transcript in the following way:
      confusions:     
      
      CLEAR [CLEAR should be: WHERE ARE] THE PEOPLE
      
      omissions:
      
      USE A TRUCK [missed: TO] GET THE PEOPLE ...
      
      commissions:
      
      IT [IT mistakenly inserted] FORGET IT
      
    Label based on the speech recognition output not on what was actually said. For the most part, the errors do not change the character of the utterances. However, if there is a difference in how you would label the speech recognition output and the actual utterance then go by the speech recognition output. You are allowed to use "partial parsing"; i.e., if the speech recognizer output is "TAKE THE DFAFDA TO DFAF" you could label it an Action Directive at the Task level.

    A summary of the speech recognition errors is provided below. Note, in utterance 54 I am not sure what the user said after the word "people". It is more of a noise than a word and certainly is not the word "left".

            HYPOTHESIS		   ACTUAL UTTERANCE
      utt7  clear the people		   where are the people
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt13 use a truck get the people   use a truck to get the people
      	from calypso to delta       from calypso to delta
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt15 it how_long will a take      how long will that take
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt19 what if we went along coast  what if we went along the coast instead
              instead
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt23 i forget it		   forget it
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt25 use the other truck get the  use the other truck to get the 
              people at exodus to delta   people at exodus to delta
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt42 send_a truck two along the   send truck two along the coast instead
              coast instead
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt48 unload a people              unload the people
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt52 use the helicopter get the   use the helicopter to get the people
              people from south_delta     from south_delta to delta
              to delta
      --------------------------------------------------------------------------
      utt54 where are the people left    where are the people ???
      
  • More Info on TRIPS
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    Last change: 13 March 98 by mcore

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