The ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation, Second Edition

AbstractISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation, established in 2012, has in the past few years been used both in corpus annotation and in the design of components for spoken and multimodal dialogue systems. This has brought some inaccuracies and undesirbale limitations of the standard to light, which are addressed in a proposed second edition. This second edition allows a more accurate annotation of dependence relations and rhetorical relations in dialogue. Following the ISO 24617-4 principles of semantic annotation, and borrowing ideas from EmotionML, a triple-layered plug-in mechanism is introduced which allows dialogue act descriptions to be enriched with information about their semantic content, about accompanying emotions, and other information, and allows the annotation scheme to be customised by adding application-specific dialogue act types.