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Article In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

dassBNC2014

Retrieving and mapping directive speech acts in an open-domain corpus of everyday conversations

ORCiD logo with link | Beijing Foreign Studies University
ORCiD logo with link | Beijing Foreign Studies University
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Abstract
This study introduces dassBNC2014, a manually annotated subset of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 designed to capture directive speech acts in everyday conversation. In natural language processing (NLP), speech act annotations in open-domain dialog remain scarce, while manually annotated data are fragmented and inconsistently accessible. With dassBNC2014, we aim to address the persistent gaps in existing resources. Our annotation scheme combines the ISO 24617-2 framework with insights from speech act theory to achieve an intermediate level of granularity, which is both theoretically grounded and operationally feasible. Analysis of the annotated directives shows that they constitute a heterogeneous set of practices varying systematically in interactional locus, temporal orientation, deontic strength and action type. These findings refine the theoretical description of directive force, establishing dassBNC2014 as a resource for advancing corpus-based speech act research and supporting the development of NLP models capable of recognizing directive speech acts in authentic conversational data.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous and current speech act taxonomies
    • 2.1Austin’s and Searle’s classifications
    • 2.2Bottom-up taxonomies
    • 2.3Our operational taxonomy for directives
  • 3.Corpus design and data annotation
    • 3.1The source corpus: Spoken BNC2014
    • 3.2Data sampling and sentence segmentation
    • 3.3Annotation process
    • 3.4Annotators and inter-annotator agreement
  • 4.A landscape of directives in everyday conversation
    • 4.1Overview of dassBNC2014
    • 4.2The heterogeneous nature of directives
      • 4.2.1Task-oriented directives
      • 4.2.2Discourse-managing directives
    • 4.3Summary
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Declaration of generative AI
  • Notes
  • Appendices
    • Appendix A.
    • Appendix B.Annotation statistics for each file in dassBNC2014
  • References
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