Question and Response Dynamics in Public Service Encounters

Wassiliki Siskou, Ingrid Espinoza, Laurin Friedrich, Steffen Eckhard, Annette Hautli-Janisz


Abstract
When deciding on social welfare benefits, street-level bureaucrats wield significant discretionary power over citizens. One of the key instruments of this power lies in the questioning patterns that control the conversational agenda in face-to-face encounters. In turn, the citizens’ responses show how they navigate these conversational constraints, for instance by answering directly or through more evasive strategies. To shed light on the power dynamics inherent in these encounters, we provide over 200 verbatim transcripts of authentic conversations in German between street-level bureaucrats and citizens, as well as a fully annotated dataset of all question-response pairs extracted from these conversations. We also present PSE v2.0, which is double the size of the only previously available corpus of spoken interactions in street-level bureaucracy. Keywords: Public Service Encounters, verbatim transcripts, question-response pairs
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.223
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2848–2855
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.223/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wassiliki Siskou, Ingrid Espinoza, Laurin Friedrich, Steffen Eckhard, and Annette Hautli-Janisz. 2026. Question and Response Dynamics in Public Service Encounters. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:2848–2855.
Cite (Informal):
Question and Response Dynamics in Public Service Encounters (Siskou et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.223.pdf