[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cai-2023-dependency-dialogue-acts-annotation-scheme/)

[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [docs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/) / [papers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/) / [English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/) / Dependency Dialogue Acts — Annotation Scheme and Case Study

# Dependency Dialogue Acts — Annotation Scheme and Case Study

**Authors:** Jon Z. Cai, Brendan King, Margaret Perkoff, Shiran Dudy, Jie Cao, Marie Grace, Natalia Wojarnik, Ananya Ganesh, [James H. Martin](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/james-h-martin/), [Martha Palmer](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/martha-palmer/), [Marilyn Walker](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/marilyn-walker/), [Jeffrey Flanigan](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/jeffrey-flanigan/) · **Year:** 2023 · **Venue:** IWSDS 2023 (arXiv:2302.12944) **Link:** [arxiv.org/abs/2302.12944](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12944) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**2** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W4322716466) openalex · 2026-10-18[**6** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/cai-2023-dependency-dialogue-acts-annotation-scheme/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[arXiv:2302.12944 · The 13th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology 2023](https://openalex.org/S4306400194)[licence](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12944)
- [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.12944)
- [arXiv 2302.12944](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12944)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4322716466)

**Authors (12)**

1. [Jon Z. Cai](https://openalex.org/A5029233436) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2130777703) · h 1 · 2 citations · 3 works
2. Brendan King [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/39326238)
3. [Margaret Perkoff](https://openalex.org/A5075600147) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2162960361) · h 2 · 32 citations · 4 works
4. [Shiran Dudy](https://openalex.org/A5008165079) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7569-5922) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2732135) · h 10 · 289 citations · 38 works
5. [Jie Cao](https://openalex.org/A5100632744) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6899-8637) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144089400) · h 8 · 273 citations · 49 works
6. Marie Grace [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2209985949)
7. [Natalia Wojarnik](https://openalex.org/A5081334348) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2209984741) · h 1 · 2 citations · 1 works
8. [Ananya Ganesh](https://openalex.org/A5084241804) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1541-6557) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/47079359) · h 8 · 4518 citations · 29 works
9. [James H. Martin](https://openalex.org/A5104054186) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/10796472) · h 14 · 863 citations · 56 works
10. [Martha Palmer](https://openalex.org/A5017464054) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9864-6974) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145755155) · h 57 · 21263 citations · 417 works
11. [Marilyn Walker](https://openalex.org/A5102868325) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3306-6439) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2234088162) · h 51 · 8599 citations · 213 works
12. [Jeffrey Flanigan](https://openalex.org/A5068647049) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8805-9482) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144683841) · h 13 · 3105 citations · 67 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-18); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Dependency Dialogue Acts (DDA) is an annotation scheme for multi-party, multi-threaded talk (classroom group work, chat). Every unit gets at least one backward edge to the unit it responds to, or a self-edge when it starts a new thread, and the dialogue act and the discourse relation are labels on that edge rather than on the unit. The threads of a conversation then fall out as connected components. Acts are 31 classes adapted from SWBD-DAMSL (questions and answers merged into coarser classes, a «joke» act added). Relations come from PDTB 3.0, with four extra cause subtypes (justify, motivation, enablement, evaluation) and three extra expansion types (process step, object attribute, list); direction is kept by dual relation names (reason ↔ result). Several edges and labels per unit are encouraged. The paper compares DDA with ISO 24617-2, STAC and Ubuntu-IRC reply graphs on examples; there is no agreement study or model.

## Ideas

- I1. Link every Say frame in a tale to the earlier Say frame it responds to (or to none, which starts a new exchange), and read the conversation threads as connected components. Then «Who was the fox talking to?» and «What did the crow answer?» follow the edges, and interleaved exchanges in tales with three or more characters stop mixing. Build it on the speaker/addressee resolution in `prag/src/frames.rs`; measure speaker and says F1 on the frame bench (now .32 and .38 on dev).
- I2. Split Mova's `cause` link by DDA's subtypes where English marks them: *motivation* (a want/need frame or a purpose *to*-clause behind an action), *justify* (a reason for a claim or for saying something), *enablement* (*so that he could*, *with the key he opened*), *evaluation*. «Why did the fox flatter the crow?» wants the motivation; «Why did the fox say so?» the justification. Measure how many `Ask::Cause` course questions are answered right before and after, with `world knowledge diagnose`.
- I3. Write links in one direction only and name the inverse (reason/result, enabling/enabled), as DDA does; check that Mova's `cause` and `next` links are stored one way and that the question reader asks the inverse when needed («What happened because …?» vs «Why …?»).

## For Mova

[38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/) §8, §10, §11 (dialogue in tales, Say frames), `36-discourse-relations.md` §11 (links between frames). Code: `prag/src/frames.rs` (response links, cause subtypes), `world/src/knowledge.rs` (cause questions). Measures: frame bench speaker/says/cause F1; course questions asking why.

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/discourse-analysis/) · [Speech act theory](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/speech-act-theory/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [arXiv 2302.12944](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12944)

```
@misc{cai2023dependency,
  title = {{Dependency Dialogue Acts — Annotation Scheme and Case Study}},
  author = {Cai, Jon Z. and King, Brendan and Perkoff, Margaret and Dudy, Shiran and Cao, Jie and Grace, Marie and Wojarnik, Natalia and Ganesh, Ananya and Martin, James H. and Palmer, Martha and Walker, Marilyn and Flanigan, Jeffrey},
  year = {2023},
  eprint = {2302.12944},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12944}
}
```

- [← previous Incorporating Information Status into Generation Ranking](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cahill-2009-incorporating-information-status-into-generation/)
- [next → A Framework for Annotating Information Structure in Discourse](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/calhoun-2005-framework-annotating-information-structure-discourse/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

8 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. 1. Afantenos, S., Asher, N., Benamara, F., Bras, M., Fabre, C., Ho-Dac, L.M., Le Draoulec, A., Muller, P., Péry-Woodley, M.P., Prévot, L., et al.: An empirical resource for discovering cognitive principles of discourse organisation: the annodis corpus. In: Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12). European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (2012) 2. Allen, J., Core, M.: Draft of damsl: Dialog act markup in several layers (1997) 3. Allen, J.F., Perrault, C.R.: Analyzing intention in utterances. Artif. Intell. 15, 143–178 (1980) 4. Allwood, J.: An activity based approach to pragmatics (1995) 5. Anscombe, G.E.M., Teichman, J., Diamond, C.: Intention and Intentionality Essays for G. E. M. Anscombe (1979) 6. Aoki, P.M., Szymanski, M.H., Plurkowski, L., Thornton, J.D., Woodruff, A., Yi, W.: Where’s the “Party” in “Multi-Party”? Analyzing the Structure of Small-Group Sociable Talk p. 10 (2006) 7. Asher, N., Hunter, J., Morey, M., Farah, B., Afantenos, S.: Discourse structure and dialogue acts in multiparty dialogue: the STAC corpus. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), pp. 2721–2727. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Portorož, Slovenia (2016). URL https:// aclanthology.org/L16-1432 8. Asher, N., Lascarides, A.: Logics of conversation. [↗](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1432/) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/asher-2016-discourse-structure-dialogue-acts-multiparty/)
2. Cambridge University Press (2003) 9. Austin, J.L.: How to do things with words. Oxford university press (1975) 10. Balakrishnan, A., Rao, J., Upasani, K., White, M., Subba, R.: Constrained decoding for neural NLG from compositional representations in task-oriented dialogue. In: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 831–844. Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy (2019). DOI 10.18653/v1/P19-1080. URL https://aclanthology.org/P19-1080 11. Bunt, H.: Dynamic interpretation and dialogue theory. The structure of multimodal dialogue 2, 139–166 (1999) 12. Bunt, H.: Dimensions in dialogue act annotation. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06) (2006) 13. Bunt, H.: The dit++ taxonomy for functional dialogue markup. In: AAMAS 2009 Workshop, Towards a Standard Markup Language for Embodied Dialogue Acts, pp. 13–24 (2009) 14. Bunt, H., Alexandersson, J., Carletta, J., Choe, J.W., Fang, A.C., Hasida, K., Lee, K., Petukhova, V., Popescu-Belis, A., Romary, L., Soria, C., Traum, D.: Towards an ISO standard for dialogue act annotation. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Valletta, Malta (2010). URL http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/ lrec2010/pdf/560_Paper.pdf 15. Bunt, H., Alexandersson, J., Choe, J.W., Fang, A.C., Hasida, K., Petukhova, V., Popescu-Belis, A., Traum, D.: ISO 24617-2: A semantically-based standard for dialogue annotation. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12), pp. 430–437. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Istanbul, Turkey (2012). URL http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/ pdf/530_Paper.pdf 16. Bunt, H., Petukhova, V., Gilmartin, E., Pelachaud, C., Fang, A., Keizer, S., Prévot, L.: The ISO standard for dialogue act annotation, second edition. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pp. 549–558. [↗](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1080) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bunt-2020-iso-standard-dialogue-act-annotation/)
3. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France (2020). URL https://aclanthology.org/2020. lrec-1.69 17. Bunt, H., Petukhova, V., Malchanau, A., Wijnhoven, K., Fang, A.: The DialogBank. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), pp. 3151–3158. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Portorož, Slovenia (2016). URL https://aclanthology.org/L16-1503 18. Bunt, H., Prasad, R.: Iso dr-core (iso 24617-8): Core concepts for the annotation of discourse relations. In: ACL 2016 (2016) 19. Carlson, L., Marcu, D., Okurowski, M.E.: Building a discourse-tagged corpus in the framework of rhetorical structure theory. In: Current and new directions in discourse and dialogue, pp. 85–112. [↗](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1503/) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/carlson-2001-building-discourse-tagged-corpus-framework/)
4. Springer (2003) 20. Cohen, P.R., Morgan, J.L., Pollack, M.E.: Intentions in communication. MIT press (1990) 21. Core, M.G., Allen, J.: Coding dialogs with the damsl annotation scheme. In: AAAI fall symposium on communicative action in humans and machines, vol. 56, pp. 28–35. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Springer+%282003%29+20%2E+Cohen%2C+P%2ER%2E%2C+Morgan%2C+J%2EL%2E%2C+Pollack%2C+M%2EE%2E%3A+Intentions+in+communication%2E+MIT+press+%281990%29+21%2E+Core%2C+M%2EG%2E%2C+Allen%2C+J%2E%3A+Coding+dialogs+with+the+damsl+annotation+scheme%2E+In%3A+AAAI+fall+sy)
5. Boston, MA (1997) 22. Di Eugenio, B., Webber, B.L.: Pragmatic overloading in natural language instructions. International Journal of Expert Systems Research and Applications 9, 53–84 (1996) 23. Du, W., Poupart, P., Xu, W.: Discovering Conversational Dependencies between Messages in Dialogs (2016). URL http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02801. ArXiv:1612.02801 [cs] 24. Elsner, M., Charniak, E.: You Talking to Me? A Corpus and Algorithm for Conversation Disentanglement. In: Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, pp. 834–842. Association for Computational Linguistics, Columbus, Ohio (2008). URL https://aclanthology. org/P08-1095 25. Godfrey, J.J., Holliman, E.C., McDaniel, J.: Switchboard: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. In: Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, IEEE International Conference on, vol. 1, pp. 517–520. [↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02801)
6. IEEE Computer Society (1992) 26. Hancher, M.: The classification of cooperative illocutionary acts1. Language in society 8(1), 1–14 (1979) 27. Hobbs, J.R.: Literature and cognition. 21. Center for the Study of Language (CSLI) (1990) 28. Jeffrey, R.C.: The Logic of Decision. New York, NY, USA: University of Chicago Press (1965) 29. Jurafsky, D.: Switchboard swbd-damsl shallow-discourse-function annotation coders manual. Institute of Cognitive Science Technical Report (1997) 30. Kautz, H.A.: A formal theory of plan recognition (1987) 31. Kummerfeld, J.K., Gouravajhala, S.R., Peper, J.J., Athreya, V., Gunasekara, C., Ganhotra, J., Patel, S.S., Polymenakos, L.C., Lasecki, W.: A Large-Scale Corpus for Conversation Disentanglement. In: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3846–3856. Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy (2019). DOI 10.18653/v1/P19-1374. URL https://aclanthology.org/P19-1374 32. Li, X., Stevens-Guille, S., Maskharashvili, A., White, M.: Self-training for compositional neural NLG in task-oriented dialogue. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 87–102. Association for Computational Linguistics, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK (2021). URL https://aclanthology.org/2021.inlg-1.10 33. Mann, W.C., Thompson, S.A.: Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text-interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 8(3), 243–281 (1988) 34. Mann, W.C., Thompson, S.A.: Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text & Talk 8, 243 – 281 (1988) 35. Prasad, R., Dinesh, N., Lee, A., Miltsakaki, E., Robaldo, L., Joshi, A., Webber, B.: The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Marrakech, Morocco (2008). URL http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/ lrec2008/pdf/754_paper.pdf 36. Prasad, R., Webber, B., Lee, A., Joshi, A.: Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0 (2019). DOI 11272.1/AB2/SUU9CB. URL https://hdl.handle.net/11272.1/AB2/SUU9CB 37. Reed, L., Oraby, S., Walker, M.: Can neural generators for dialogue learn sentence planning and discourse structuring? In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 284–295. Association for Computational Linguistics, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (2018). DOI 10.18653/v1/W18-6535. URL https:// aclanthology.org/W18-6535 38. Reese, B., Hunter, J., Asher, N., Denis, P., Baldridge, J.: Reference manual for the analysis and annotation of rhetorical structure. Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin (2007) 39. Searle, J.R., Searle, J.R.: Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language, vol. 626. Cambridge university press (1969) 40. Stent, A.: Rhetorical structure in dialog. In: INLG’2000 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 247–252. Association for Computational Linguistics, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel (2000). DOI 10.3115/1118253.1118288. URL https://aclanthology.org/W00-1433 41. Vermazen, B., Hintikka, M.: Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events. [↗](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1374) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/enud-1988-mann-rhetorical-structure-theory-functional/)
7. Clarendon Press (1985). URL [https://books.google.com/books?id=1R_lAAAAIAAJ](https://books.google.com/books?id=1R_lAAAAIAAJ) 42. Wang, H., Wang, C., Zhai, C., Han, J.: Learning online discussion structures by conditional random fields. In: Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval, pp. 435–444 (2011) 43. Wang, Y.C., Rose, C.: Making conversational structure explicit: identification of initiation-response pairs within online discussions. In: Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 673–676 (2010) 44. Wittgenstein, L.: Philosophical investigations. [↗](https://books.google.com/books?id=1R_lAAAAIAAJ)
8. John Wiley & Sons (2010) 45. Wolf, F., Gibson, E.: Representing discourse coherence: A corpus-based study. Computational linguistics 31(2), 249–287 (2005) [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=John+Wiley+%26+Sons+%282010%29+45%2E+Wolf%2C+F%2E%2C+Gibson%2C+E%2E%3A+Representing+discourse+coherence%3A+A+corpus%2Dbased+study%2E+Computational+linguistics+31%282%29%2C+249%E2%80%93287+%282005%29)