Developing a Corpus of Indirect Speech Act Schemas

Antonio Roque, Alexander Tsuetaki, Vasanth Sarathy, Matthias Scheutz

Abstract
Resolving Indirect Speech Acts (ISAs), in which the intended meaning of an utterance is not identical to its literal meaning, is essential to enabling the participation of intelligent systems in peoples’ everyday lives. Especially challenging are those cases in which the interpretation of such ISAs depends on context. To test a system’s ability to perform ISA resolution we need a corpus, but developing such a corpus is difficult, especialy given the contex-dependent requirement. This paper addresses the difficult problems of constructing a corpus of ISAs, taking inspiration from relevant work in using corpora for reasoning tasks. We present a formal representation of ISA Schemas required for such testing, including a measure of the difficulty of a particular schema. We develop an approach to authoring these schemas using corpus analysis and crowdsourcing, to maximize realism and minimize the amount of expert authoring needed. Finally, we describe several characteristics of collected data, and potential future work.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
220–228
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.28
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antonio Roque, Alexander Tsuetaki, Vasanth Sarathy, and Matthias Scheutz. 2020. Developing a Corpus of Indirect Speech Act Schemas. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 220–228, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Developing a Corpus of Indirect Speech Act Schemas (Roque et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.lrec-1.28.pdf
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