Dataset Card for SwDA

Dataset Summary

The Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus (SwDA) extends the Switchboard-1 Telephone Speech Corpus, Release 2 with turn/utterance-level dialog-act tags. The tags summarize syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information about the associated turn. The SwDA project was undertaken at UC Boulder in the late 1990s. The SwDA is not inherently linked to the Penn Treebank 3 parses of Switchboard, and it is far from straightforward to align the two resources. In addition, the SwDA is not distributed with the Switchboard's tables of metadata about the conversations and their participants.

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

Languages

The language supported is English.

Dataset Structure

Utterance are tagged with the SWBD-DAMSL DA.

Data Instances

An example from the dataset is:

{'act_tag': 115, 'caller': 'A', 'conversation_no': 4325, 'damsl_act_tag': 26, 'from_caller': 1632, 'from_caller_birth_year': 1962, 'from_caller_dialect_area': 'WESTERN', 'from_caller_education': 2, 'from_caller_sex': 'FEMALE', 'length': 5, 'pos': 'Okay/UH ./.', 'prompt': 'FIND OUT WHAT CRITERIA THE OTHER CALLER WOULD USE IN SELECTING CHILD CARE SERVICES FOR A PRESCHOOLER. IS IT EASY OR DIFFICULT TO FIND SUCH CARE?', 'ptb_basename': '4/sw4325', 'ptb_treenumbers': '1', 'subutterance_index': 1, 'swda_filename': 'sw00utt/sw_0001_4325.utt', 'talk_day': '03/23/1992', 'text': 'Okay. /', 'to_caller': 1519, 'to_caller_birth_year': 1971, 'to_caller_dialect_area': 'SOUTH MIDLAND', 'to_caller_education': 1, 'to_caller_sex': 'FEMALE', 'topic_description': 'CHILD CARE', 'transcript_index': 0, 'trees': '(INTJ (UH Okay) (. .) (-DFL- E_S))', 'utterance_index': 1}

Data Fields

• swda_filename: (str) The filename: directory/basename.
• ptb_basename: (str) The Treebank filename: add ".pos" for POS and ".mrg" for trees
• conversation_no: (int) The conversation Id, to key into the metadata database.
• transcript_index: (int) The line number of this item in the transcript (counting only utt lines).
• act_tag: (list of str) The Dialog Act Tags (separated by ||| in the file). Check Dialog act annotations for more details.
• damsl_act_tag: (list of str) The Dialog Act Tags of the 217 variation tags.
• caller: (str) A, B, @A, @B, @@A, @@B
• utterance_index: (int) The encoded index of the utterance (the number in A.49, B.27, etc.)
• subutterance_index: (int) Utterances can be broken across line. This gives the internal position.
• text: (str) The text of the utterance
• pos: (str) The POS tagged version of the utterance, from PtbBasename+.pos
• trees: (str) The tree(s) containing this utterance (separated by ||| in the file). Use [Tree.fromstring(t) for t in row_value.split("|||")] to convert to (list of nltk.tree.Tree).
• ptb_treenumbers: (list of int) The tree numbers in the PtbBasename+.mrg
• talk_day: (str) Date of talk.
• length: (int) Length of talk in seconds.
• topic_description: (str) Short description of topic that's being discussed.
• prompt: (str) Long decription/query/instruction.
• from_caller: (int) The numerical Id of the from (A) caller.
• from_caller_sex: (str) MALE, FEMALE.
• from_caller_education: (int) Called education level 0, 1, 2, 3, 9.
• from_caller_birth_year: (int) Caller birth year YYYY.
• from_caller_dialect_area: (str) MIXED, NEW ENGLAND, NORTH MIDLAND, NORTHERN, NYC, SOUTH MIDLAND, SOUTHERN, UNK, WESTERN.
• to_caller: (int) The numerical Id of the to (B) caller.
• to_caller_sex: (str) MALE, FEMALE.
• to_caller_education: (int) Called education level 0, 1, 2, 3, 9.
• to_caller_birth_year: (int) Caller birth year YYYY.
• to_caller_dialect_area: (str) MIXED, NEW ENGLAND, NORTH MIDLAND, NORTHERN, NYC, SOUTH MIDLAND, SOUTHERN, UNK, WESTERN.

Dialog act annotations

Data Splits

I used info from the Probabilistic-RNN-DA-Classifier repo: The same training and test splits as used by Stolcke et al. (2000). The development set is a subset of the training set to speed up development and testing used in the paper Probabilistic Word Association for Dialogue Act Classification with Recurrent Neural Networks.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

[More Information Needed]

Source Data

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

The SwDA is not inherently linked to the Penn Treebank 3 parses of Switchboard, and it is far from straightforward to align the two resources Calhoun et al. 2010, §2.4. In addition, the SwDA is not distributed with the Switchboard's tables of metadata about the conversations and their participants.

Who are the source language producers?

[More Information Needed]

Annotations

Annotation process

[More Information Needed]

Who are the annotators?

[More Information Needed]

Personal and Sensitive Information

[More Information Needed]

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset

[More Information Needed]

Discussion of Biases

[More Information Needed]

Other Known Limitations

[More Information Needed]

Additional Information

Dataset Curators

Christopher Potts, Stanford Linguistics.

Licensing Information

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Citation Information

@techreport{Jurafsky-etal:1997,
    Address = {Boulder, CO},
    Author = {Jurafsky, Daniel and Shriberg, Elizabeth and Biasca, Debra},
    Institution = {University of Colorado, Boulder Institute of Cognitive Science},
    Number = {97-02},
    Title = {Switchboard {SWBD}-{DAMSL} Shallow-Discourse-Function Annotation Coders Manual, Draft 13},
    Year = {1997}}

@article{Shriberg-etal:1998,
    Author = {Shriberg, Elizabeth and Bates, Rebecca and Taylor, Paul and Stolcke, Andreas and Jurafsky, Daniel and Ries, Klaus and Coccaro, Noah and Martin, Rachel and Meteer, Marie and Van Ess-Dykema, Carol},
    Journal = {Language and Speech},
    Number = {3--4},
    Pages = {439--487},
    Title = {Can Prosody Aid the Automatic Classification of Dialog Acts in Conversational Speech?},
    Volume = {41},
    Year = {1998}}

@article{Stolcke-etal:2000,
    Author = {Stolcke, Andreas and Ries, Klaus and Coccaro, Noah and Shriberg, Elizabeth and Bates, Rebecca and Jurafsky, Daniel and Taylor, Paul and Martin, Rachel and Meteer, Marie and Van Ess-Dykema, Carol},
    Journal = {Computational Linguistics},
    Number = {3},
    Pages = {339--371},
    Title = {Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech},
    Volume = {26},
    Year = {2000}}

Contributions

Thanks to @gmihaila for adding this dataset.