Speech Act Annotation for Domain Specific Multilingual Expression Services

We propose an approach to overcome cultural barriers, specifically pragmatic misunderstandings about the intention of the speaker by annotating domain specific language resources according to an ontology based on speech acts. These annotations are capable to account for indirect speech acts as well as for phenomena of mitigation and reinforcement. The presented architecture preserves the original structure of the resource by providing metadata specified using RDF. We illustrate our purpose by a manually annotated corpus designed to facilitate interaction with foreign patients in Japanese hospitals.