                Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus
                  Released August 1, 1997

The Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus is a version of the Switchboard
corpus of telephone conversations tagged with a shallow discourse
tagset of approximately 60 basic tags (plus combinations).  The
tags were drawn from a label set called  the 'SWBD-DAMSL' labels,
and were used to label 1155 Switchboard conversations from a
pre-release version of the Penn Treebank 3 release of the Switchboard
transcripts.   The corpus comprises dialog act labels
for 205,000 utterances and 1.4 million words.

The labeling project was run by Dan Jurafsky, Liz Shriberg, and
Debra Biasa as part of the the Discourse Language Model group of
the Johns Hopkins WS97 summer workshop on large-vocabulary
conversational speech recognition workshop,  sponsored by the US
Department of Defense.  The coders,  who were all linguistics
graduate students at the University of Colorado at Boulder at the
time, were Marion Bond, Traci Curl, Anu Erringer, Michelle Gregory,
Lori Heintzelman, Taimi Metzler, and Amma Oduro.

Because the dialog act project was begun before the final release
of the Penn Treebank 3 Switchboard transcriptions and before the
ISIP cleanup of the Switchboard transcriptions, the transcriptions
in the corpus differ in various ways from both those later releases.

The original 60 SWBD-DAMSL tags and their combinations were clustered
into 42 tags.  Many subsequent papers have made use of those 42
tags rather than the original set.

Details of the  labels themselves, the instructions to the labelers,
and the clustering into 42 tags can be found in Jurafsky, Shriberg,
and Biasca (1997), which can be found in this release in

doc/manual.august1.html

and can be cited as:

  Jurafsky, Daniel, Elizabeth Shriberg, and Debra Biasca. 1997.
  "Switchboard SWBD-DAMSL Shallow-Discourse-Function Annotation Coders
  Manual, Draft 13"  University of Colorado, Boulder Institute of
  Cognitive Science Technical Report 97-02

The results of the WS97 project that make use of this
corpus were published as:

  Stolcke, Andreas, Klaus Ries, Noah Coccaro, Elizabeth Shriberg,
  Rebecca Bates, Daniel Jurafsky, Paul Taylor, Rachel Martin, Marie
  Meteer, and Carol Van Ess-Dykema. 2000. Dialogue Act Modeling for
  Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech.
  Computational Linguistics 26:3, 339-371
  
  Shriberg, Elizabeth, Rebecca Bates, Paul Taylor, Andreas Stolcke,
  Daniel Jurafsky, Klaus Ries, Noah Coccaro, Rachel Martin, Marie
  Meteer, and Carol Van Ess-Dykema. 1998. Can Prosody Aid the Automatic
  Classification of Dialog Acts in Conversational Speech? Language and
  Speech 41:3-4, 439-487

The transcripts themselves can be found in this release in the 14
Treebank 3-style directories sw00utt through sw13utt, with each
utterance marked by a tag at the beginning of the line.
