An Empirical Investigation of Proposals in Collaborative Dialogues

An Empirical Investigation of Proposals in Collaborative Dialogues Barbara Di Eugenio Pamela W. Jordan Johanna D. Moore Richmond H. Thomason Learning Research & Development Center, and Intelligent Systems Program University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA {dieugeni, jordan, jmoore, thomason}@isp, pitt. edu Abstract We describe a corpus-based investigation of propos- als in dialogue. First, we describe our DR/compliant coding scheme and report our inter-coder reliability results. Next, we test several hypotheses about what constitutes a well-formed proposal. 1 Introduction Our project's long-range goal (see http://www.isp. pitt.edu/'intgen/) is to create a unified architecture for collaborative discourse, accommodating both in- terpretation and generation. Our computational ap- proach (Thomason and Hobbs, 1997) uses a form of weighted abduction as the reasoning mechanism (Hobbs et al., 1993) and modal operators to model context. In this paper, we describe the corpus study portion of our project, which is an integral part of our investigation into recognizing how conversa- tional participants coordinate agreement. From our first annotation trials, we found that the recogni- tion of "classical" speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1975) by coders is fairly reliable, while recognizing contextual relationships (e.g., whether an utterance accepts a proposal) is not as reliable. Thus, we ex- plore other features that can help us recognize how participants coordinate agreement. Our corpus study also provides a preliminary as- sessment of the Discourse Resource Initiative (DR/) tagging scheme. The DRI is an international "grass- roots" effort that seeks to share corpora that have been tagged with the core features of interest to the discourse community. In order to use the core scheme, it is anticipated that each group will need to refine it for their particular purposes. A usable draft core scheme is now available for experimentation (see http://www.georgetown.edu/luperfoy/Discourse- Treebank/dri-home.html). Whereas several groups are working with the unadapted core DR/ scheme (Core and Allen, 1997; Poesio and Traum, 1997), we have attempted to adapt it to our corpus and particular research questions. First we describe our corpus, and the issue of tracking agreement. Next we describe our coding scheme and our intercoder reliability outcomes. Last we report our findings .on tracking agreement. 2 Tracking Agreement Our corpus consists of 24 computer-mediated dialogues 1 in which two participants collaborate on a simple task of buying furniture for the living and dining rooms of a house (a variant of the task in (Walker, 1993)). The participants' main goal is to negotiate purchases; the items of highest priority are a sofa for the living room and a table and four chairs for the dining room. The problem solving task is complicated by several secondary goals: 1) Match colors within a room, 2) Buy as much furniture as you can, 3) Spend all your money. A point system is used to motivate participants to try to achieve as many goals as possible. Each subject has a bud- get and inventory of furniture that lists the quanti- ties, colors, and prices for each available item. By sharing this initially private information, the partici- pants can …

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