In this work, we address the annotation of language resources through the application of the engagement network in appraisal theory. This work represents an attempt to extend the advances in studies of speech and dialogue acts to encompass the latest notion of stance negotiations in discourse, between the writer and other sources. This type of phenomenon has become especially salient in contemporary media communication and requires some timely research to address emergent requirement. We shall first of all describe the engagement network as proposed by Martin and White (2005) and then discuss the issue of multisubjectivity. We shall then propose and describe a bi-step procedure towards better annotation before discussing the benefits of engagement network in the assessment of speaker-writer stance. We shall finally discuss issues of annotation consistency and reliability.

ISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation, established in 2012, has in the past few years been used both in corpus annotation and in the design of components for spoken and multimodal dialogue systems. This has brought some inaccuracies and undesirbale limitations of the standard to light, which are addressed in a proposed second edition. This second edition allows a more accurate annotation of dependence relations and rhetorical relations in dialogue. Following the ISO 24617-4 principles of semantic annotation, and borrowing ideas from EmotionML, a triple-layered plug-in mechanism is introduced which allows dialogue act descriptions to be enriched with information about their semantic content, about accompanying emotions, and other information, and allows the annotation scheme to be customised by adding application-specific dialogue act types.

This paper presents the DialogBank, a new language resource consisting of dialogues with gold standard annotations according to the ISO 24617-2 standard. Some of these dialogues have been taken from existing corpora and have been re-annotated according to the ISO standard; others have been annotated directly according to the standard. The ISO 24617-2 annotations have been designed according to the ISO principles for semantic annotation, as formulated in ISO 24617-6. The DialogBank makes use of three alternative representation formats, which are shown to be interoperable.