Mutsuko TOMOKIYO
Japanese Discourse Representation
using Communicative Act Labels
Abstract:We previously investigated Japanese and English utterances focusing on their Communicative Acts, and presented a paraphrase-based methodology for discovering
and revising sets of cue-based CAs for labeling spontaneous dialogues. This report
extends the investigation of automatic CA analysis in two directions. First, we note
a significant relation between segmentation based upon cue patterns and segmentation based upon natural pauses: 77% of the pause-bounded segments in our corpus
coincide with segments defined by CAs. Second, we describe attempts to parse CA
groupings, and thus to analyze discourse structures, using context-free rules. Experiments on ten spontaneous Japanese dialogues show that the obtained groupings
are useful for resolution of referring expressions of ellipses and that pro-forms and
their referents fall within certain groupings about 78.5% of the time.
Keywords: communicative goal, pause, CA units, pause units, discourse structure, representation, speech act