Enhancing ISO 24617-2: Formalizing Apology and Thanking Acts for Spoken R ussian Dialogue Annotation (2025)

Abstract: This paper refines ISO 24617-2’s Social Obligations Management dimension by formalizing apology and thanking acts for Russian dialogue annotation. Addressing gaps in formal definitions and limited response strategies, we propose culture-neutral semantic cores using Wierzbicka’s universal primes and update semantics. We introduce three response functions: address (minimal acknowledgment), downplay (mitigation), and decline (reinforcement). Validated through qualitative analysis, this framework captures empirical strategies—including non-response, formulaic minimization, and strategic obligation maintenance—unaddressed in the current standard. Our approach maintains ISO compatibility while eliminating unsubstantiated elements like obligatory response pressure, enhancing annotation accuracy for Russian dialogue.

## introduction natural dialogue involves nuanced negotiation of social obligations that extends beyond binary frameworks. while iso 24617-2:2020 provides a comprehensive framework for social obligations management (som), its treatment of core functions like apology and thanking reveals opportunities for refinement. the standard currently lacks formal definitions for these functions and offers limited coverage of response strategies beyond acceptance -a gap particularly evident when applied to casual spoken dialogues. building on wierzbicka's universal primes and empirical observations, we propose a formalization of the apology/thanking and the hierarchy of respective response functions. this approach accommodates cross-linguistic variation while addressing empirical observations from russian dialogue data, where conventional response taxonomy fail to capture strategies like non-committal address-ing, downplaying, or explicit declination. by providing formal definitions and expanded response taxonomies for apology and thanking functions, this work offers a framework that can be utilized in implementing more nuanced social reasoning in automated systems. our primary contributions are: this paper is structured as follows: section 2 reviews iso 24617-2's som dimension and prior work; section 3 establishes our theoretical foundation in politeness and semantic primitives; section 4 describes the russian multimedia politeness corpus and annotation methodology; sections 5 and 6 present formalizations and case studies for apologies and thankings, respectively; section 7 discusses implications for dialogue annotation standards. ## related work the iso 24617-2 standard @xcite @xcite ) is a multidimensional dialogue act annotation scheme based on the dynamic interpretation theory (dit) @xcite and the dit++ taxonomy @xcite . it provides the semantic framework for the analysis of the communicative behaviour of dialogue participants and has been sucessfully applied to the dialogue act annotation in a number of languages @xcite @xcite @xcite . communicative functions in the standard are mapped to 10 different dimensions across 5 contexts @xcite . these dimensions are responsible for the information about the task or activity which motivates the dialogue, including dealing with social obligations. the corresponding social obligations management dimension includes functions related to greeting, introduction, apology, thanking, leave-taking, etc. the extended taxonomy suggested by @xcite includes functions to account for the common social intentions such as politeness questions. communicative functions are defined by their update semantics: updates they impose onto addressee's context @xcite . these updates consist of basic semantic concepts called semantic primitives. there are both generalpurpose semantic primitives, which can be used in forming updates for communicative functions in any of the dimensions, and dimension-specific primitives. although the iso standard does not provide formal definitions of communicative functions in terms of these updates, they were used during the process of creating the standard @xcite . to our knowledge, the specified formal definitions of the communicative functions @xcite did not include the definitions for apology, thanking and their response functions. ## pragmatic perspectives on apology and thanking while apologies universally function as remedial acts addressing normative violations through expressions of regret and responsibility acceptance, their specific linguistic realizations and contextual applications are culture-bound. while the politeness autonomy-based framework @xcite and cross-linguistic preconditions (speaker involvement, recognized breach, perceived harm) @xcite offer valuable analytical tools, they do not provide a framework for cross-cultural generalization. similarly, thanking acts manifest culture-specific expressions of benefit acknowledgment and debt management @xcite , operating as positive politeness strategies within the universal po-liteness framework @xcite . both speech acts fundamentally negotiate social valence-apologies repairing negative equilibrium, thankings reinforcing positive bonds -yet their concrete realizations vary cross-culturally. @xcite proposed that universal primes provide the most suitable framework for capturing this variation, reducing apology/thanking to: i did/didn't do something (to/for you). i feel something bad because of this. @xcite these culture-neutral explications avoid ethnocentric presuppositions inherent in other models. however, any operationalization grounded in real language necessitates culture-linked correlates. when formalizing definitions and annotating examples, naming associated feelings is unavoidable. in the proposed formalization (sections 5.2 and 6.2): a corresponding emotional correlate that dominates russian interactions concerning breaches of social norms is guilt. while regret/guilt and grateful/indebtedness may serve as operational correlates in other languages, we acknowledge that these specific emotional mappings reflect russian cultural patterns and should not be assumed universal. our methodological contribution lies in proposing that annotation of apology-and thanking-related acts in any language should identify and employ the specific core emotions that culturally drive these speech act realizations. ## data and annotation this study leverages dialogues from the russian multimedia politeness corpus @xcite , a resource designed to model politeness phenomena in contemporary spoken russian. the rmpc comprises manually transcribed excerpts from modern russian films, capturing five core politeness scenarios: greetings, acquaintance rituals, apologies, thankings, and leave-takings. each transcript includes punctuation annotation and is enriched with paralinguistic features -specifically non-verbal markers (e.g., gestures, facial expressions) and sociopragmatic variables grounded in foundational sociolinguistic frameworks @xcite @xcite . for the purpose of this study, we initially applied the iso 24617-2:2020 annotation framework to apology and thanking sequences within the corpus. the discovered limitations in the current primary (apology, thanking) and response (accep-tapology/thanking) functions necessitated an iterative extension of the taxonomy. the extended scheme was then tested through targeted annotation of salient sequences -rather than full dialogue application -to validate its descriptive adequacy. ## conclusion in this paper we proposed the refinement to the iso 24617-2's social obligations management dimension through formal extensions for apologyand thanking-related functions. by grounding definitions in wierzbicka's universal primes, we established culture-neutral semantic cores for apology and thanking, while accommodating russianspecific realizations through correlates like guilt and indebtedness. our key contributions -the address, downplay, and decline response functions -resolve empirical gaps in the current standard, enabling precise annotation of strategies observed in russian dialogues: non-response (e.g. in the opening positions), formulaic downplaying, and strategic declination. the proposed formalizations maintain iso compatibility through update semantics while omitting unsubstantiated elements like automatic "pressure to respond". future work involves extending our research to other social obligations management functions, such as leave-taking and greetings, using the same methodology of culture-neutral formalization grounded in empirical data. the second objective lies in complete annotation of the communicative functions in the dialogues from the russian multimedia politeness corpus. ultimately, this research aims to contribute to the development of evaluation frameworks that can assess how well conversational agents, large language models, and other dialogue systems understand and deploy appropriate politeness strategies within specific cultural and contextual parameters.