Annotation of japanese response tokens and preliminary analysis on their distribution in three-party conversations

In this paper, we propose a new annotation scheme for Japanese response tokens (RTs), which is based on strict and consistent procedures. Our scheme consists of two-stage annotation, in which RTs are first identified and classified according to their forms and then further sub-classified based on their sequential positions. Six forms are included in our class of RTs: i) responsive interjections, ii) expressive interjections, iii) lexical reactive expressions, iv) repetitions, v) completions, and vi) assessments. Some of them bear an additional tag according to their sequential position in the discourse: i) first pair parts, ii) second pair parts, iii) sequence-closing thirds, iv) other responding turns, and v) unclassifiable positions. We apply our scheme to annotate a Japanese three-party conversation corpus, and present the results of a preliminary analysis on the distribution of RTs in the corpus.