---
title: "Annotating Spoken Dialogs — Dinarelli 2009"
description: "Most Spoken Language Understanding systems either use hand-crafted semantic grammars, which have weak coverage and robustness, or flat attribute-value…"
authors: ["Marco Dinarelli", "Silvia Quarteroni", "Sara Tonelli", "Alessandro Moschitti", "Giuseppe Riccardi"]
year: 2009
venue: "Proceedings of SRSL 2009, the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W09-0505/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/dinarelli-2009-annotating-spoken-dialogs-speech-segments/"
---
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# Annotating Spoken Dialogs: From Speech Segments to Dialog Acts and Frame Semantics

**Authors:** [Marco Dinarelli](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/marco-dinarelli/), Silvia Quarteroni, [Sara Tonelli](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/sara-tonelli/), [Alessandro Moschitti](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/alessandro-moschitti/), [Giuseppe Riccardi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/giuseppe-riccardi/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of SRSL 2009, the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W09-0505/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W09-0505.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2080922525)

**Citations:** 57 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [18](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Most Spoken Language Understanding systems either use hand-crafted semantic grammars, which have weak coverage and robustness, or flat attribute-value labeling, which does not capture how concepts relate to each other. Within the EU LUNA project, the authors built a multi-layer annotated corpus of Italian spoken dialogs from a software/hardware help desk. The goal is to support statistical semantic parsers and richer dialog systems. The corpus combines real human-human (HH) calls and human-machine (HM) dialogs collected with a Wizard of Oz setup. Its layers are:
- POS and morphosyntax (EAGLES)
- domain attribute-value concepts
- syntactic parses
- dialog acts, based on a compact taxonomy derived from DAMSL, TRAINS and DIT++
- predicate argument structures following FrameNet, extended with new frames where English ones were missing

The paper describes the annotation pipeline and tools and gives frequency statistics for both corpora. It also estimates mutual information between frames and dialog acts. Most frames are strongly linked to a single dialog act, so shallow semantics looks like a useful feature for dialog act classification. The authors present this as the first SDS corpus to combine HH and HM dialogs with lexical, semantic and dialog layers.

## Key points
- **Corpus plan and taxonomy:** The corpus is planned at 1000 dialogs, split evenly between HH and HM. The dialog act taxonomy has 16 tags in four groups: core, conventional, feedback/turn management, and Other. It is also used by the statistical Dialogue Manager of the ADAMACH project.
- **Tools:** Utterance segmentation and dialog act labeling were done by hand in MMAX. For PAS annotation, utterances were parsed with Bikel's parser trained for Italian, and frames were annotated in Salto, which stores data in TIGER-XML.
- **Segmentation differences:** HH dialogs required 167 turn mergings and 225 splittings. HM dialogs needed only 158 splittings, and dialog act variety was higher in HH.
- **HM dialog acts:** The HM corpus contains 947 dialog acts, led by Info-request (26.3%), Answer (18.1%) and Inform (17.2%). Its most frequent frame bigram is Greeting–Being named (17.1%).
- **Mutual information analysis:** Using 20 HH dialogs and 50 HM dialogs, the authors used weighted conditional entropy to approximate mutual information between frames and dialog acts. Examples of strong links:
  - In HM, info-req pairs with Being in operation, and act-req pairs with Replacing.
  - In HH, quit pairs with Greeting.

*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/shelves/linguistics/)

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

## Cited by

Cited by

18 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 16 not yet.

- [Transfer of Corpus-Specific Dialogue Act Annotation to ISO Standard: Is it worth it?](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/chowdhury-2016-transfer-corpus-specific-dialogue-act/)
- [Annotation of Discourse Relations for Conversational Spoken Dialogs](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/tonelli-2010-annotation-discourse-relations-conversational-spoken/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{dinarelli2009annotating,
  title = {{Annotating Spoken Dialogs: From Speech Segments to Dialog Acts and Frame Semantics}},
  author = {Dinarelli, Marco and Quarteroni, Silvia and Tonelli, Sara and Moschitti, Alessandro and Riccardi, Giuseppe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of SRSL 2009, the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3115/1626296.1626301},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1626296.1626301}
}
```

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## References

12 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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