Dialog acts in greeting and leavetaking in social talk

Abstract

Conversation proceeds through dialogue moves or acts, and dialog act annotation can aid the design of artificial dialog. While many dialogs are task-based or instrumental, with clear goals, as in the case of a service encounter or business meeting, many are more interactional in nature, as in friendly chats or longer casual conversations. Early research on dialogue acts focussed on transactional or task-based dialogue but work is now expanding to social aspects of interaction. We review how dialog annotation schemes treat non-task elements of dialog -- greeting and leave-taking sequences in particular. We describe the collection and annotation, using the ISO Standard 24617-2 Semantic annotation framework, Part 2: Dialogue acts, of a corpus of 187 text dialogues and study the dialog acts used in greeting and leave-taking.