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Dialog Intent Structure: A Hierarchical Schema of Linked Dialog Acts

In this paper, we present a new hierarchical and extensible schema for dialog representation. The schema captures the pragmatic intents of the conversation independently from any semantic representation. This schema was developed to support computational applications, be applicable to different types of dialogs and domains and enable large-scale non-expert annotation. The schema models dialog as a structure of linked units of intent, dialog acts, that are annotated on minimal spans of text, functional segments. Furthermore, we categorise dialog acts based on whether they express a primary or secondary intent and whether the intent is explicit or implicit. We successfully tested the schema on an heterogeneous corpus of human-human dialogs comprising both spoken and chat interactions.