What is ISO 24617‑2 about?
ISO 24617‑2 is part two of the multi-series standard that provides a set of empirically and theoretically well-motivated concepts for dialogue annotation, a formal language for expressing dialogue annotations (the Dialogue Act Markup Language, DiAML), and a method for segmenting a dialogue into semantic units. This allows the manual or automatic annotation of dialogue segments with information about the communicative actions which the participants perform by their contributions to the dialogue.
The annotation scheme specified in ISO 24617‑2 supports multidimensional annotation of spoken, written, and multimodal dialogues involving two or more participants. Dialogue units are viewed as having multiple communicative functions in different dimensions. The markup language DiAML has an XML-based representation format and a formal semantics which makes it possible to perform inferences with DiAML representations.
ISO 24617‑2 also specifies data categories for dimensions of dialogue analysis, for communicative functions, for dialogue act qualifiers, and for relations between dialogue acts. Additionally, it provides mechanisms for customizing these sets of concepts, extending them with application-specific or domain-specific concepts and descriptions of semantic content, or selecting relevant coherent subsets of them. These mechanisms make the dialogue act concepts specified in ISO 24617‑2 useful not only for annotation but also for the recognition and generation of dialogue acts in interactive systems.
Who is ISO 24617‑2 for?
ISO 24617‑2 on semantic annotation framework (SemAF) is useful for:
- Dialogue Act Markup Language developers
- Organizations using Dialogue Act Markup Language
- Writers
- Books publishers
- Bloggers
Why should you use ISO 24617‑2?
ISO 24617‑2 provides for dimensions of dialogue analysis, for communicative functions, for dialogue act qualifiers, and for relations between dialogue acts.
ISO 24617‑2 supports multidimensional annotation of spoken, written, and multimodal dialogues involving two or more participants.
ISO 24617‑2 lays out specifications of the annotation scheme which includes dimensions, communicative functions and functional and feedback dependences.
ISO 24617‑2 gives The Dialogue Act Markup Language DiAML which has been designed in accordance with ISO 24617‑6, which implements the distinction made in the Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF, ISO 24612) between annotations and representations.
ISO 24617‑2 is useful not for annotation and for the recognition and generation of dialogue acts in interactive systems.
What’s changed since the last update?
BS ISO 24617‑2:2020 is the second edition that replaces the first edition (ISO 24617‑2:2012), which has been technically revised.
The main changes compared to the previous edition are as follows:
- In 6.2, ‘reference segments’ are introduced to allow more accurate annotations of feedback dependence relations
- In 6.3, a more detailed way of annotating rhetorical relations between dialogue acts is made possible by importing concepts from iso 24617‑8:2016 (dr-core)
- In 7.2, the contact management dimension, known from the dit++ annotation scheme, and the task management dimension, known from the damsl annotation scheme, have been added, along with a few communicative functions specific for contact management
- In 7.5 and annex d, a possibility is introduced for importing elements from the w3c recommendation emotionml in order to add affective information to dialogue acts
- In clause 9 and Annex D, the mechanism of ‘triple-layered annotation scheme plug-in’ with ‘plug-in interface’ is introduced; this mechanism allows the dialogue act annotation to be customized, using application-specific concepts, and to be enriched with semantic content information