Discourse Structure and Dialogue Acts in Multiparty Dialogue: the STAC Corpus

Discourse Structure and Dialogue Acts in Multiparty Dialogue: the STAC Corpus †Nicholas Asher, ‡Julie Hunter, ‡Mathieu Morey, ‡ Farah Benamara, ‡Stergos Afantenos †IRIT, CNRS; ‡IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier 118 route de Narbonne, 30162 Toulouse, France {nicholas.asher; julie.hunter; mathieu.morey; farah.benamara; stergos.afantenos}@irit.fr Abstract This paper describes the STAC resource, a corpus of multi-party chats annotated for discourse structure in the style of SDRT (Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Lascarides and Asher, 2009). The main goal of the STAC project is to study the discourse structure of multi-party dialogues in order to understand the linguistic strategies adopted by interlocutors to achieve their conversational goals, especially when these goals are opposed. The STAC corpus is not only a rich source of data on strategic conversation, but also the first corpus that we are aware of that provides full discourse structures for multi-party dialogues. It has other remarkable features that make it an interesting resource for other topics: interleaved threads, creative language, and interactions between linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts. Keywords: discourse structure, strategic conversation, multiparty dialogue This paper describes the STAC resource, a corpus of multi- party chats annotated for discourse structure in the style of SDRT (Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Lascarides and Asher, 2009). The main goal of the STAC project1 is to study the discourse structure of multi-party dialogues in order to un- derstand the linguistic strategies adopted by interlocutors to achieve their conversational goals, especially when these goals are opposed. The STAC corpus is not only a rich source of data on strategic conversation, but also the first corpus that we are aware of that provides full discourse structures for multi-party dialogues. It has other remark- able features that make it an interesting resource for other topics: interleaved threads, creative language, and interac- tions between linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts. 1. The corpus Our corpus comes from an online version of the game The Settlers of Catan—a win-lose, multi-player game in which players acquire and trade resources (ore, wood, wheat, clay, or sheep) in order to build roads, settlements, and cities and in turn score victory points. Resources are sometimes al- located automatically after a turn, but generally a player will have access to only a strict subset of the resources she needs, prompting her to trade with other players to achieve her goals. We collected our corpus by modifying an on- line, open-source version of Catan with a chat interface in which players could carry out trade negotiations.2 Fig- ure 1 is a snapshot of the board game, showing the chat window (“Chat”), chat history (“History”), and game his- tory (“Game”), where the game history details all of the extra-linguistic events (e.g., dice rolls, card plays) from the game. This snapshot shows the perspective of the game ad- ministrator; normally, the type of resources that a player has is revealed only to that player. The moves from the “Game” window and those from “History” are automati- cally recorded and aligned in a game log, which allows us to The authors gratefully acknowledge research …

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