The distribution of discourse relations within and across turns in spontaneous conversation

S. Magalí López Cortez, Cassandra L. Jacobs


Abstract
Time pressure and topic negotiation may impose constraints on how people leverage discourse relations (DRs) in spontaneous conversational contexts. In this work, we adapt a system of DRs for written language to spontaneous dialogue using crowdsourced annotations from novice annotators. We then test whether discourse relations are used differently across several types of multi-utterance contexts. We compare the patterns of DR annotation within and across speakers and within and across turns. Ultimately, we find that different discourse contexts produce distinct distributions of discourse relations, with single-turn annotations creating the most uncertainty for annotators. Additionally, we find that the discourse relation annotations are of sufficient quality to predict from embeddings of discourse units.
Anthology ID:
2023.codi-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Michael Strube, Chloe Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Sharid Loaiciga, Amir Zeldes
Venue:
CODI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
156–162
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.codi-1.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.codi-1.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
S. Magalí López Cortez and Cassandra L. Jacobs. 2023. The distribution of discourse relations within and across turns in spontaneous conversation. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2023), pages 156–162, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The distribution of discourse relations within and across turns in spontaneous conversation (López Cortez & Jacobs, CODI 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.codi-1.21.pdf
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 https://aclanthology.org/2023.codi-1.21.mp4