--- title: "Dialog Intent Structure — paper by Pareti and Lando (2018)" description: "The paper proposes a dialog-act annotation scheme built for conversational agents rather than for general linguistic… 4 references, cited by 6 papers here." authors: ["Silvia Pareti", "Tatiana Lando"] year: 2018 venue: "Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/L18-1460/" 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/pareti-2018-dialog-intent-structure-hierarchical-schema/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/pareti-2018-dialog-intent-structure-hierarchical-schema/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2018/page/5/) / Dialog Intent Structure: A Hierarchical Schema of Linked Dialog Acts # Dialog Intent Structure: A Hierarchical Schema of Linked Dialog Acts **Authors:** Silvia Pareti and [Tatiana Lando](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tatiana-lando/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/) ([LREC 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/2018/)) · **Publisher:** [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1460/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1460.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2805172814) **Citations:** 9 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [6](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/pareti-2018-dialog-intent-structure-hierarchical-schema/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper proposes a dialog-act annotation scheme built for conversational agents rather than for general linguistic description. Standards such as DAMSL and ISO 24617-2 are rich but complex, and they were not designed for human–computer interaction. The authors' scheme treats a conversation as a graph of intents. Turns are cut into functional segments (FSs), which are minimal continuous spans that carry intent. Each FS gets one primary dialog act and at most one secondary act, and each act is marked as explicit or implicit. Responses are linked to the segment that triggered them. Tags follow a three-level hierarchy with dotted names such as request.query.open, and the hierarchy can be extended further. The scheme was refined over several pilots on human–human user-assistant dialogs, both spoken and chat. In the latest pilot (20 English and 10 Italian dialogs), three annotators agreed on primary intents with Kappa .71 for English and .64 for Italian. Analysis of a 65-dialog English corpus shows that about a third of acts are not requests or responses. This matters because systems that model dialog purely as question-answer exchanges miss that portion. ## Key points - **Tag hierarchy:** 6 top-level classes (Request, Respond, Assert, Social, Other, Add_on), 14 mid-level tags and 34 fine-grained tags. Names inherit the full path, e.g. request.query.open. - **Segmentation rules:** - Every piece of text belongs to exactly one FS, with no overlaps and no nesting. - FSs are continuous and stay within a turn. - Split or interrupted acts are joined with a technical `goes_with` label. - Spans with no identifiable function get a `no-intent` tag. - **Agreement:** primary-DA Kappa among three annotators was .71 for English and .64 for Italian. Splitting turns into FSs and linking acts reached reasonable agreement, though annotators who misunderstood the task lowered it. - **Corpus statistics (65 English dialogs):** - Request and Respond acts make up 65.4% of the data, Assert/Social/Other 29.9%, and Add_on 4.7%. - There are 1.87 FSs per turn on average: 2.03 in spoken dialogs and 1.68 in written ones. - 7.6% of FSs carry an implicit intent, and 2.4% have an implicit primary intent. - **Tag frequencies:** the top 10 primary DAs cover about 60% of the data, with notify.acknowledge most frequent at roughly 10%. Among secondary tags, provide.statement accounts for 28%, often paired with an implicit request, and query.yn for 12%. ## Interesting ideas - Acts are labelled by the reaction the speaker expects, not by the speaker's inner state, so "What?" and "Can you repeat?" both count as a request to repeat and call for the same follow-up. - Each segment separates a primary intent (the one that drives the dialog state) from an optional secondary intent, and each is flagged as explicit or implied via implicature, as in "Thank you so much" quietly accepting an offer of tea. - The annotation is kept flat and machine-friendly: full coverage, no overlap, continuous spans, and a separate joining label for discontinuous pieces. - The authors plan to make non-expert annotation easier by having annotators pick coarse tags first and then refine them down the hierarchy. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (frames): speech-act labels in prag could encode the expected listener response, so that different surface forms of one request map to a single frame. - Response acts are not split by the type of act they answer; instead they are linked to the triggering segment, so one `reject` tag covers declining an instruction, a suggestion or an offer. — (frames): keeping the speech-act inventory small and storing the trigger as a graph edge would avoid combinatorial label growth in prag. - **I2** (frames): the implicature module could output primary/secondary acts with an explicit/implicit flag, which would make indirect requests like "Can you…?" explainable instead of collapsed. - **I3** (tree): a similar non-overlapping segmentation with explicit join links could simplify how utterance segments are stored above the UD trees. - **I4** (learn): LLM teacher tiers could label speech acts coarse-to-fine, checking agreement at each level before committing to fine tags. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [Google](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/companies/google/) — Company, Mountain View, United States · 353 works · 364,806 citations - [University of Edinburgh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-edinburgh/) — University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom · 255 works · 68,771 citations 📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 9,086 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 8,889 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works 🧭 Topics (2): [🗨️ Dialogue systems](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/dialogue-systems/) · 401 works · [💬 Speech act theory](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/speech-act-theory/) · 160 works ## Cite Cite as: Silvia Pareti and Tatiana Lando. 2018. Dialog Intent Structure: A Hierarchical Schema of Linked Dialog Acts. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{pareti2018dialog, title = {{Dialog Intent Structure: A Hierarchical Schema of Linked Dialog Acts}}, author = {Silvia Pareti and Tatiana Lando}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, doi = {10.63317/24qyij4nv6um}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/24qyij4nv6um} } ``` - [← previous Derivational Relations in Arabic WordNet](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/batita-2018-derivational-relations-arabic-wordnet/) - [next → Mind the Gap: Data Enrichment in Dependency Parsing of Elliptical Constructions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/droganova-2018-mind-gap-data-enrichment-dependency/) - [↑ back to papers of 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2018/page/5/) ## References 4 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Allen, J. (1997). Draft of DAMSL : Dialog Act Markup in Several Layers. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Allen%2C+J%2E+%281997%29%2E+Draft+of+DAMSL+%3A+Dialog+Act+Markup+in+Several+Layers%2E) 2. Bunt, H., Alexandersson, J., Carletta, J., Choe, J.-W., Chengyu Fang, A., Hasida, K., Lee, K., Petukhova, V., Popescu-Belis, A., Romary, L., Soria, C., and Traum, D. (2010). Towards an ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation. In Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10), La Valette, Malta, May. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bunt-2010-iso-standard-dialogue-act-annotation/) 3. Bunt, H., Alex, J., woong Choe, J., Fang, A. C., Hasida, K., Petukhova, V., Popescu-belis, A., and Traum, D. (2012). ISO 24617-2: A Semantically-based Standard for Dialogue Annotation. In In Proceedings Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bunt-2012-iso-24617-2-semantically-based/) 4. Carletta, J., Isard, S., Doherty-Sneddon, G., Isard, A., Kowtko, J. C., and Anderson, A. H. (1997). The Reliability of a Dialogue Structure Coding Scheme. Computational linguistics, 23(1):13–31. [↗](https://doi.org/10.5555/972684.972686) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/carletta-1997-reliability-dialogue-structure-coding-scheme/) *Updated 24 October 2026*