Below is a short annotated fragment of dialogue ‘TRAINS 2’ represented in DiAML-XML format and the DiAML-MultiTab and DiAML-TabSW formats. The dialogue was collected and annotated in the TRAINS project, and re-segmented and re-annotated according to ISO 24617-2 for inclusion in the DialogBank.

The following dialogue fragment is covered:

S: Hello, can I help you?
U: Yes, I have a problem I need to transport two tankers of OJ to Avon and three boxcars to Elmire, the Bananas must arrive in Elmire by nine p.m.
S: Okay

View the fragment’s ISO 24617-2 annotation in the DiAML-XML, DiAML-MultiTab and DiAML-TabSW representation formats.

For more in-depth information, including concepts, examples and guidelines see ‘Annotation Representations and the Construction of the DialogBank’, The DialogBank‘ (2016) and ‘The DialogBank: Dialogues with Interoperable Annotations’ (2018). See also the Guidelines page for more information about the formats and ISO 24617-2 in general, and information on how to create your own annotations.

Conversions between DiAML representation formats

The DialogBank provides a conversion program (Windows, Mac) that allows for automatic conversions between the three DiAML representation formats. A second, less extensive conversion program (Windows, Mac) includes only the DiAML-TabSW to DiAML-XML conversion.

About the DialogBank:

Bunt, H., V. Petukhova, E. Gilmartin, C. Pelachaud, A. Fang, S. Keizer and L. Prévot (2020) The ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation, Second Edition. in Proceedings 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), online,. June 2020.

Bunt, H., V. Petukhova, A. Malchanau, A. Fang and K. Wijnhoven (2019). The DialogBank: Dialogues with Interoperable Annotations. Language Resources and Evaluation 53, 213-249. Available online at DOI: 10.1007/s10579-018-9436-9

Bunt, H., V. Petukhova, A. Malchanau, A. Fang and K. Wijnhoven (2016). The DialogBank. In Proceedings 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), Portoroz, Slovenia, May 2016.

See also the poster that summarises this paper.

Wijnhoven, K. (2016). Annotation Representations and the Construction of the DialogBank. Master’s Thesis. Tilburg University.

About ISO 24617-2:

• Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, Emer Gilmartin, Catherine Pelachaud, Alex Fang, Simon Keizer, and Laurent Prevot
  The ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation, Second Edition. In Proceedings 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020),Marseille.
• Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
  ‘Adapting the ISO 24617-2 Dialogue Act Annotation Scheme for Modelling Medical Consultations’. In Proceedings of the 16th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-16), pp. 74-86.
• Bunt, H. (2019). Annotation Guidelines for using ISO standard 24617-2 for Dialogue Act Annotation (2019). TiCC Technical Report 2019-1, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, February 2019.
• Bunt, H., E. Gilmartin, S. Keizer, C. Pelachaud, V. Petukhova, L. Prévot and Mariët Theune (2018) Downward Compatible Revision of Dialogue Act Annotation. In Proceedings 14th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-14), Santa Fe (New Mexico), USA, pp. 21-34.
• Ngo, Thi-Lan and Pham, Khac Linh (2018). A Vietnamese Dialog Act Corpus based on ISO Standard 24617-2, In Proceedings 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018.
• Bunt, H., V. Petukhova and A. Fang (2017) Revisiting the ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation. In Proceedings 13th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-13), Montpellier, France, September 2017.
• Bunt, H., V. Petukhova, D. Traum and J. Alexandersson (2017). Dialogue Act Annotation with the ISO 24617-2 Standard. In Deborah Dahl (ed.) Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Towards Natural User Interfaces to Everything. Springer, Berlin, pp. 109-135A.
• Bunt, H., Alexandersson, J., Choe, J. W., Fang, A. C., Hasida, K., Petukhova, V., Popescu-Belis, A., & Traum, D. R. (2012).ISO 24617-2: A semantically-based standard for dialogue annotation. In Proceedings 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, pp. 430-437.
• Bunt, H. (2012). Data categories for dialogue acts. Unpublished manuscript, Tilburg University.
• 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. (2010). Towards an ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation. In Proceedings 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010), Marrakech. ELRA, Paris.
• Bunt, H., Fang, A., Cao, J., Liu, X., & Petukhova, V. (2013). Issues inn the addition of ISO standard annotations to the Switchboard corpus. In Proceedings 9th Joint ISO – ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-9). Potsdam, pp. 59-70.
• Bunt, H. (2006). Dimensions in Dialogue Act Annotation, In Proceedings 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006), Genoa, Italy. ELRA, Paris.
• Bunt, H., Kipp, M., & Petukhova, V. (2012). Using DiAML and ANVIL for multimodal dialogue annotations. In Proceedings 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2012), Istanbul. ELRA, Paris, pp. 1301-1308.
• Chowdhury, S., Stepanov, E. and Riccardi (2016). G. Transfer of Corpus-Specific Dialogue Act Annotation to ISO Standard: Is it worth it LREC16-DA-Standard-ISO. In Proceedings 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), Portoroz, Slovenia, May 2016.
• Fang, A., Bunt, H. C., Cao, J., & Liu, X. (2012). Applicability verification of a new ISO standard for dialogue act annotation with the switchboard corpus. In Proceedings of EACL 2012 Workshop on Innovative Hybrid Approaches to the Processing of Textual Data, Avignon.
• Fang, A. C., Cao, J., Bunt, H., & Liu, X. (2012). The annotation of the Switchboard corpus with the new iso standard for dialogue act analysis. In Proceedings 8th Joint ISO – ACL SIGSEMA Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-8), Pisa, pp. 13-18.
• Petukhova, V., Malchanau, A., & Bunt, H. (2014). Interoperability of Dialogue Corpora through ISO 24617-2-based Querying. In Proceedings 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), Reykjavik. ELRA, Paris.
• Petukhova, V., & Bunt, H. (2012). The coding and annotation of multimodal dialogue acts. In LREC (pp. 1293-1300).

About DIT++

• Harry Bunt
  Plug-ins for content annotation of dialogue acts. In Proceedings of the 15th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-15), Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 34-45.
• Bunt, H. (2011). Multifunctionality in dialogue. Computer Speech & Language, 25(2), 222-245.
• V. Petukhova and H. Bunt (2010) Context-driven integrated dialogue act generation. In Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2010, the 14th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (PozDial). Poznán, Poland, June 2010, pp. 1-8.
• V. Petukhova and H. Bunt (2010) Towards an integrated scheme for semantic annotation of multimodal dialogue data. In Proceedings of LREC 2010, the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Malta, May 16-23, May 2010. ELDA, Paris, pp. 2556-2563.
• Bunt, H. (2009). The DIT++ taxonomy for functional dialogue markup. In AAMAS 2009 Workshop, Towards a Standard Markup Language for Embodied Dialogue Acts (pp. 13-24).
• Geertzen, J., V. Petukhova and H. Bunt (2008). Dialogue Act Tagging with Naive and Expert Annotators. In: Proceedings 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakech.
• Geertzen, J.A. (2007). DitAT: a flexible tool to support web-based dialogue annotation. In: Proceedings 7th International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-7), pp. 320-323.
• Bunt, H. (2006). Dimensions in Dialogue Act Annotation. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
• Geertzen, J., Girard, Y., Morante, R., Van der Sluis, I., Van Dam, H., Suijkerbuijk, B., Van der Werf, R., & Bunt, H. (2004). The DIAMOND project. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Catalog’04.
• Isard, A., D. Mckelvie and Henry S. Thompson (1998). Towards A Minimal Standard For Dialogue Transcripts: A New SGML Architecture For The HCRC Map Task Corpus. In Proceedings 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP98), Sydney.
• Petukhova, V., & Bunt, H. (2014). Incremental Recognition and Prediction of Dialogue Acts. In Computing Meaning, Vol. 4 (pp. 235-256). Springer Netherlands.
• Petukhova, V., & Bunt, H. (2012). The coding and annotation of multimodal dialogue acts. In Proceedings LREC 2012, Istanbul (pp. 1293-1300).

About other annotation schemes and corpora:

• Allen, J. Aand Schubert, L. (1991). The TRAINS project, Technical Report 382 and TRAINS Technical Note 91-1, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester.
• Bunt, H. and R. Prasad (2016). ISO-DR-Core (ISO 24617-8): Core concepts for the annotation of discourse relations. In Proceedings 12th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-12), Portoroz, Slovenia, pp. 45-54.
• Calhoun, S., Carletta, J., Brenier, J. M., Mayo, N., Jurafsky, D., Steedman, M., & Beaver, D. (2010). The NXT-format Switchboard Corpus: a rich resource for investigating the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and prosody of dialogue. Language Resources and Evaluation, 44(4), 387-419.
• Core, M. and Allen, J. (1997). Coding Dialogs with the DAMSL Annotation Scheme. In Working Notes of AAAI Fall Symposium on Communicative Action in Humans and Machines, Boston. [Postscript] [Addendum]
• Jurafsky, D., & Shriberg, E. (1997). Switchboard SWBD-DAMSL Shallow-Discourse-Function Annotation Coders Manual, Draft 13, University of Colorado at Boulder & SRI International.
• Ladd, D.R. and Schepman, A. (1999). Dutch Map task Corpus. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive (distributor). SN: http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-4632-1.
• Meteer, M. W., Taylor, A. A., MacIntyre, R., & Iyer, R. (1995). Dysfluency annotation stylebook for the Switchboard corpus. University of Pennsylvania.
• Petukhova, V., Gropp, M., Klakow, D., Schmidt, A., Eigner, G., Topf, M., Srb, S., Motlicek, P., Potard, B., Dines, J., Deroo, O., Egeler, R., Meinz, U. and Liersch, S. (2014). The DBOX Corpus Collection of Spoken Human-Human and Human-Machine Dialogues. In Proceedings 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), Reykjavik.

Some background literature:

• Harry Bunt (2022) The multifunctionality of utterances in interactive discourse. In Multifunctionality in English, Zihan Yin and Elaine Vine (eds.). Routledge, London & New York, pp. 11-29. DOI: 10.4324/9781003155072-3.
• Bunt, H. (in 2017). Computational Pragmatics.A Chapter 17, Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics,AYan Huang, editor. Oxford University Press.
• Bunt, H. (2011). Multifunctionality in dialogue. Computer Speech & Language, 25(2), 222-245.
• Bunt, H. (2015). On the principles of semantic annotation. In Proceedings 11th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-11), London, April 2015, pp. 1-13.
• Bunt, H. (2014). Annotations that effectively contribute to semantic interpretation. In Computing Meaning, Vol. 4, Harry Bunt, Johan Bos and Stephen Pulman, editors. Springer, Dordrecht.
• ISA-11 (2015). Proceedings of the 11th Joint ISO – ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-11), Queen Mary University London, April 2015, pp. 80-92.
• Keizer, S., O. Dusek, X. Liu and V. Rieser (2019) User evaluation of a Multidimensional Statistical Dialogue System. In Proceedings SIGDIAL 2019.
• Andrei Malchanau, Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
  ‘Towards Integration of Cognitive Models in Dialogue Management: Designing the Virtual Negotiation Coach Application.’ Dialogue and Discourse 9(2), 35-79. DOI: 10.5087/dad.2018.202. See also the online version.
• Andrei Malchanau, Volha Petukhova and Harry Bunt
  ‘Multimodal dialogue system evaluation: A case study applying usability standards.’ In Proceedings Ninth International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS-9) Singapore.
• James Pusstejovsky, Harry Bunt, and Annie Zaenen (2016). Designing Annotation Schemes: From Theory to Model.
  In Nancy Ide and James Pustejovsky (eds): Handbook of Linguistic Annotation, Springer, Berlin (in press)
• Pustejovsky, J. and A. Stubbs. Natural Language Annotation and Machine Learning. O’Reilly Publishers, 2012.
• Ide, N., & Romary, L. (2004). International standard for a linguistic annotation framework. Natural Language Engineering, 10(3-4), 211-225.