This paper contributes to the limited body of empirical research in the domain of discourse structure of information seeking queries. We describe the development of an annotation schema for coding topic development in information seeking queries and the initial observations from a pilot sample of query sessions. The main idea that we explore is the relationship between constant and variable discourse entities and their role in tracking changes in the topic progression. We argue that the topicalized entities remain stable across development of the discourse and can be identified by a simple mechanism where anaphora resolution is a precursor. We also claim that a corpus annotated in this framework can be used as training data for dialogue management and computational semantics systems.
@InProceedings{ANDERSSON16.808,
author = {Marta Andersson and Adnan Ozturel and Silvia Pareti}, title = {Annotating Topic Development in Information Seeking Queries}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper