ISO 24617-2: A semantically-based standard for dialogue annotation

This paper summarizes the latest, final version of ISO standard 24617-2 “Semantic annotation framework, Part 2: Dialogue acts”. Compared to the preliminary version ISO DIS 24617-2:2010, described in Bunt et al. (2010), the final version additionally includes concepts for annotating rhetorical relations between dialogue units, defines a full-blown compositional semantics for the Dialogue Act Markup Language DiAML (resulting, as a side-effect, in a different treatment of functional dependence relations among dialogue acts and feedback dependence relations); and specifies an optimally transparent XML-based reference format for the representation of DiAML annotations, based on the systematic application of the notion of ‘ideal concrete syntax’. We describe these differences and briefly discuss the design and implementation of an incremental method for dialogue act recognition, which proves the usability of the ISO standard for automatic dialogue annotation.