Dialogue Function Units for Studying Interaction across Modalities and Genres: Overview and Annotation Manual Version 2.0

This document explains an annotation schema for interactions among two or more participants that applies across modalities and types of interaction. It also serves as an annotation manual. The goal is to provide a single an-notation that can document the the communicative flow for many types of interaction. It relies on a reduced set of dialogue act types, groups together into a single Dialogue Function Unit (DFU) a sequence of dialogue acts of the same type that have a common intention (analogous to a plan), and places a special emphasis on the analogue of adjacency pairs, which we capture as links between DFUs. The initial version of the annotation manual was de-veloped through analysis of examples from three contrasting corpora: Enron email threads, Switchboard telephone conversations, and the Dover trial tran-scripts. This version (v 2.0) has been updated as a result of annotation of 21 thou-sand words of a library-patron telephone transaction corpus, and 18 thousan