---
title: "Transfer of Corpus-Specific Dialogue Act — Chowdhury 2016"
description: "Many spoken dialogue corpora use their own adaptations of schemes such as DAMSL or DIT++."
authors: ["Shammur Absar Chowdhury", "Evgeny Stepanov", "Giuseppe Riccardi"]
year: 2016
venue: "Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L16-1020/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chowdhury-2016-transfer-corpus-specific-dialogue-act/"
---
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# Transfer of Corpus-Specific Dialogue Act Annotation to ISO Standard: Is it worth it?

**Authors:** [Shammur Absar Chowdhury](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/shammur-absar-chowdhury/), [Evgeny Stepanov](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/evgeny-stepanov/), [Giuseppe Riccardi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/giuseppe-riccardi/) · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1020/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1020.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2576140812)

**Citations:** 10 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [8](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Many spoken dialogue corpora use their own adaptations of schemes such as DAMSL or DIT++. Their dialogue act (DA) labels are therefore incompatible across corpora, which makes the corpora hard to reuse. The authors test whether converting such legacy labels to the ISO standard DiAML (ISO 24617-2) pays off. They semi-automatically re-annotated the DA-labelled part of the Italian LUNA Human-Human corpus (help-desk dialogues). A one-to-many mapping from LUNA tags to DiAML proposed labels, and an annotator re-segmented turns into functional segments and resolved ambiguous labels. They also annotated a small out-of-domain set of call-center dialogues with DiAML. A linear SVM on bag-of-words features was trained with each scheme and evaluated in three settings: in-domain, cross-domain, and data aggregation (pooling in-domain and out-of-domain training data). In-domain results were roughly equal for both schemes. The ISO labels transferred noticeably better to the new domain and benefited from pooled data. The authors conclude that migrating legacy annotations to the standard is worthwhile, since it makes corpora interoperable without losing classification accuracy.

## Key points
- **Data:** LUNA has 572 dialogues, of which 50 carry DA labels (3,268 DAs, split into 40 training and 10 test dialogues). The out-of-domain set has 10 energy/utilities call-center dialogues (1,472 DAs). The legacy scheme has 15 tags; DiAML has 56 communicative functions across 9 dimensions.
- **Agreement:** On 15 dialogues, the agreement between the legacy annotator and the ISO annotator was F1 = 0.68, computed after Levenshtein-based alignment of the segments.
- **Classifier:** Weka SMO with a linear kernel and default parameters, using bag-of-words features of the DA span only. The authors treat this as a baseline.
- **Dimension level (micro F1):** Legacy scored 0.72 in-domain, 0.60 cross-domain and 0.72 with aggregation. ISO scored 0.72, 0.67 and 0.74 respectively.
- **Communicative function level (micro F1):** Legacy with 16 classes scored 0.44 in-domain and 0.30 cross-domain. ISO with 41 classes scored 0.40 and 0.37. ISO mapped back to the 16 legacy classes scored 0.47 and 0.45. Legacy models gained more from aggregation (0.49) but lost much more accuracy cross-domain.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Speech act theory](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/speech-act-theory/)

## Cited by

Cited by

8 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 6 not yet.

- [ISO-Standard Domain-Independent Dialogue Act Tagging for Conversational Agents](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mezza-2018-iso-standard-domain-independent-dialogue/)
- [MIDAS: A Dialog Act Annotation Scheme for Open Domain Human-Machine Spoken Conversations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yu-2021-midas-dialog-act-annotation-scheme/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{chowdhury2016transfer,
  title = {{Transfer of Corpus-Specific Dialogue Act Annotation to ISO Standard: Is it worth it?}},
  author = {Chowdhury, Shammur Absar and Stepanov, Evgeny and Riccardi, Giuseppe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/342s3teowe5e},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/342s3teowe5e}
}
```

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## References

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