Kuidas tuvastada dialoogi struktuuri: korpuse analüüs
HOW TO RECOGNISE THE DIALOGUE STRUCTURE: CORPUS ANALYSIS

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this study is to determine the dialogue structure formed by microlevel units – dialogue acts. The empirical material of the study is a small part (nine human-human dialogues) of a corpus consisting of telemarketing calls. In the calls communication takes place between business representatives on a win-win basis, which means that the caller (a sales clerk of an educational company) is offering a competence, supposedly needed by the receiver (a customer). Dialogues are recorded in authentic situations and then transliterated using the transcription of conversation analysis. Dialogue acts (DA) are annotated in the transcripts but neither syntactic nor semantic analysis is performed. The study investigates DA markers which would help to identify the phases of a telemarketing call: 1) the opening, where a sales clerk introduces himself and the educational company, 2) explanation of the needs of a customer where question-answer dialogue takes place between a clerk and a customer, 3) argumentation where several arguments for taking a course are presented by a clerk, taking into account the actual needs of the customer, 4) coming to a decision. Rules for recognition of the structure of telemarketing calls will be formulated on the basis of sequences of (adjacency pairs of) dialogue acts and their position in a dialogue. A further aim is to implement software for automatic pragmatic analysis of the calls in order to recognise dialogue acts, sub-dialogues, and the linear structure of dialogues.

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