Computational

Models of
Discourse
Analysis
Carolyn Penstein Ros
Language Technologies Institute/
Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Warm-Up

Can you explain speech

acts from Gees perspective
(using his terms)?
i.e.,

what is a speech act?

Can you explain speech

acts from Martin and Roses
perspective (using their
terms)?

Note that we can use work like

Levensons Differently
We talked about Gees 42 questions as
being like feature extractors
Martin & Roses systems give us a map,
showing us where to look for evidence
(almost the same?)
Levinsons work raises questions shows
us distinctions that need to be accounted
for, potential holes in our approach

Levinson helps us think in detail

on a technical level about how
particular words are
functioning
According to the performative hypothesis, frankly should be functioning the
same way in all of these utterances, but its not. In 50 and 52 it modifies the way
the message is told, in 51 its a warning that something negative is coming.
What does this tell us about using words as evidence in Pragmatic oriented
interpretation?

Which accomplishes a bet and

how do you know?

* What does that tell you about how to model speech acts computationally?

Plan for Upcoming Unit

For next time we will pass out examples from AMI and coding manual
By Wed I will link in the readings for Unit 2
Next Monday I will hand out the annotated corpus and documentation for SIDE
plugins

Student Comment

I'm not sure we can analyze a text using

our current knowledge of speech acts. We
can only determine if there are any speech
acts and where specifically they occur.
Speech act theory as we've discussed it so
far doesn't include any analytical feature
beyond sentence deconstruction, unlike
Gee's and SFL methodologies.

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Digging in to the roots

Gee: Anthropology
Martin & Rose:
Rhetoric and
Literary Theory
Levinson:
Philosophy and
Logic

Whats the connection?

Gee: Anthropology
Speech

acts are kinds of discourse practices,

there are conventional ways of doing things with
words as indicated through form-function
correspondences
Figured worlds set up conditionally relevant
speech acts (adjacency pairs)

Martin & Rose: Rhetoric and Literary Theory

The

Negotiation framework is a very simplified

system of speech acts

Student Questions
I think that the main difference between
speech act analysis and the other types of
analyses that we have covered thus far is
that it explicitly asks the analyst to consider
a certain texts many voicesits
heteroglossia
why would someone want to talk if they are
not trying to achieve something
(consciously, or unconsciously)?

Please clarify

Throughout the conversation, Jim uses

illocutionary force to direct the flow of
conversation. From "go ahead" (2) to the series
of probing questions (12, 15, 23, 33, 39, 57, 64,
82), his statements range from clearly pushing
the conversation ahead to something that is
closer to bordering on factual yes/no questions.
Even as he gets more into informational
questions, near the end of the dialogue, these are
still compelling Bonnie to continue her
explanations.

What can we do with speech

acts?

Recognize what actions users are doing in a natural

language based interface
Sometimes mixed with domain level frames to detect
what someone wanted in a task based dialogue
system (scheduling a meeting, registering for a
conference, making an airplane reservation)
If clusters of speech acts are associated with roles, you
can use them to identify roles within an interaction

Current work on meeting summarization

Some work on social positioning in the mixedinitiative dialogue community in the 90s

What questions can we answer with

them?
You could think of them as moves in a game (like chess)

Each move is part of a strategy

Moves work together to accomplish intentions
But each speaker has their own set of intentions in some sense
they are competing
You can explain what strategies were effective or not for
accomplishing any of these intentions
From this analysis, you can conclude things about power,
positioning, influence, etc.
Why might someone be insulted when you politely explain
something to them?

You can talk about different social languages used to enact

speech acts (e.g., direct versus indirect)

What do we gain from this diversity?

Gee: Anthropology
Martin & Rose:
Rhetoric and
Literary Theory
Levinson:
Philosophy and
Logic

* In some ways our goals are different from all of these. But all of them have
insights into how language works. Anthropologists know how it functions in
societies. Rhetoriticians know how it functions in interpersonal relationships. And
logicians have thought about how humans are able to interpret language from the
available evidence.

Why all the focus on truth

conditions?

Formal semantics is based on logic

Evaluating meaning of a sentence is:
translating the sentence into logic,
evaluating it within a model
Models define what is given and what
inferences can be made
Evaluating meaning in a model means
evaluating whether the model makes that
sentence true or not

What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is what is beyond truth conditional
meaning
Part of the chapter focuses on whether there
is anything beyond truth conditional meaning
If you accept that there is something beyond
that, one thing there is is what language
does, apart from what it means
Formal pragmatics is about building models
that allow us to compute what language does

Speech act inventories

Early Computational Approaches

AMI Annotation Scheme

Later Dialogue Act Tagging

Approaches

Text classification based approaches

Things you should know:

Using

Nave Bayes, SVM, HMMs, CRFs

Note that HMMs and CRFs are statistical

techniques that pick up on sequencing
Conditional probability P(X|Y): If you know Y is true
already, what is the probability that X is true?
If probabilities are independent, you can combine
them by multiplying

Features:

Unigrams, bigrams, POS bigrams

What to think about as you

read?

What distinguishes the set of speech acts

that are being focused on?
What evidence would you as a human use
to make your choice?
What evidence is this computational
approach taking into account?
What is it missing?
Can you think of examples that you think it
would miss?

Corpora for experimentation

Unit 2: Maptask data (Negotiation coding)

Possibly

other chat corpora with same coding

as well

Unit 3: Product Reviews (Sentiment)

Unit 4: Blog corpus (Age and Gender)
Unit 5: AMI meeting corpus (Dialogue Acts)
Other corpora

Email

discussion list (Social Support coding)

Assignment 1 (not due til Feb2)

Transcribe a scene from a favorite move, play, or TV show

As

a shortcut, you can find a script online

Excerpt should be no more than one page of text

Select one of the methodologies we are discussing in Unit 1

(e.g., from Gee, Martin & Rose, or Levinson)
Do a qualitative analysis of the data and write it up

Use

readings from Unit 1 as a collection of models to chose from

Due on Week 4 lecture 2

Turn

in data, raw analysis (can be annotations added to the data),

and write up (your interpretation of the analysis)
Not required now!! Prepare a powerpoint presentation for class (no more than 5 minutes of
material)

Other Ideas: Twitter data, Google Groups, transcribe a real

conversation (if your conversational partners agree)

Questions?