Criteria for the segmentation of spoken input into individual utterances

Abstract

This report describes how spoken language turns are segmented into utterances in the framework of the verbmobil project. The problem of segmenting turns is directly related to the task of annotating a discourse with dialogue act information: an utterance can be characterized as a stretch of dialogue that is attributed one dialogue act. Unfortunately, this rule in many cases is insufficient and many doubtful cases remain. We tried to at least reduce the number of unclear cases by providing a number of hands-on rules for segmenting dialogues. In that sense, we hope that this document is helpful for labeling dialogues with discourse information. This report has to be seen as an extension of the verbmobil Report No.65 that includes a detailed discussion of the various dialogue act types employed in verbmobil. All dialogue act types used throughout this report are taken from the set defined there.