A Taxonomy of Discourse Markers in Dialog

(2003). Towards a taxonomy of a set of discourse markers in dialog: a theoretical and computational linguistic account. Abstract Discourse markers are verbal and non-verbal devices that mark transition points in communication. They presumably facilitate the construction of a mental representation of the events described by the discourse. A taxonomy of these relational markers is one important beginning in investigations of language use. While several taxonomies of coherence relations have been proposed for monolog, only a few have been proposed for dialog. This paper presents a taxonomy of between-turn coherence relations in dialog and discusses several issues that arise out of constructing such a taxonomy. A large number of discourse markers was sampled from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Two judges substituted each type of these markers for all other markers. This extensive substitution test determined whether hyponymous, hypernymous and synonymous relations existed between the markers from this corpus of dialogs. Evidence is presented for clustering coherence relations into four categories: direction, polarity, acceptance and empathics. language is the act of communication that normally is coordinated between its participants. The speaker or writer of a message needs to coordinate when to say what, what to say to whom, how and why to say it. In writing this is often difficult because the hearer is not simultaneously present in the communicative act 1. In dialog, speakers have the advantage that hearers are present They know whether they have the hearer " s attention, whom they are talking to, when they can start and stop speaking, and what they can say. Hearers generally give clues on each of these aspects by providing feedback. Coordination between speakers and hearers consists of multifaceted tasks between the parties involved. For instance, speakers need to monitor whether hearers are attending to what is said (is the hearer making eye contact?), who they are talking to (is the hearer an authority?), when they are speaking (is there a pause in the conversation which allows the speaker to start speaking?), what to say (how to express a meaningful information?), and whether the speaker needs to follow up on an earlier piece of information (is there anything that is by convention expected from the speaker based on previous pieces of information). This makes dialog a very dynamic act of coordination. Take for instance the following dialog in the Santa Barbara Corpus for Spoken American English (SBSAE) …