Semantic annotations for conversational speech: From speech transcriptions to predicate argument structures

In this paper, we describe the semantic content, which can be automatically generated, for the design of advanced dialog systems. Since the latter will be based on machine learning approaches, we created training data by annotating a corpus with the needed content. Given a sentence of our transcribed corpus, domain concepts and other linguistic levels ranging from basic ones, i.e. part-of-speech tagging and constituent chunking level, to more advanced ones, i.e. syntactic and predicate argument structure (PAS) levels are annotated. In particular, the proposed PAS and taxonomy of dialog acts appear to be promising for the design of more complex dialog systems. Statistics about our semantic annotation are reported.