This paper aims at enriching Annotation-Based Semantics (ABS) with the notion of small visual worlds, called the Vox worlds, to interpret dialogues in natural language. It attempts to implement classical set-theoretic models with these Vox worlds that serve as interpretation models. These worlds describe dialogue situations while providing background for the visualization of those situations in which these described dialogues take place interactively among dialogue participants, often triggering actions and emotions. The enriched ABS is based on VoxML, a modeling language for visual object conceptual structures (vocs or vox) that constitute the structural basis of visual worlds.

VoxML is a modeling language used to map natural language expressions into real time visualizations using real-world semantic knowledge of objects and events. Its utility has been demonstrated in embodied simulation environmens and in agent-object interactions in situated human-agent communicative. It is enriched to work with notions of affordances, both Gibsonian and Telic, and habitat for various interactions between the rational agent (human) and an object. This paper aims to specify VoxML as an annotation language in general abstract terms. It then shows how it works on annotating linguistic data that express visually perceptible human-object interactions. The annotation structures thus generated will be interpreted against the enriched minimal model created by VoxML as a modeling language while supporting the modeling purposes of VoxML linguistically.

This paper proposes a semantics ABS for the model-theoretic interpretation of annotation structures. It provides a language ABSr, that represents semantic forms in a (possibly 𝜆-free) type-theoretic first-order logic. For semantic compositionality, the representation language introduces two operators ⊕ and ⊘ with subtypes for the conjunctive or distributive composition of semantic forms. ABS also introduces a small set of logical predicates to represent semantic forms in a simplified format. The use of ABSr is illustrated with some annotation structures that conform to ISO 24617 standards on semantic annotation such as ISO-TimeML and ISO-Space.

In this paper, we present ISO-TimeML, a revised and interoperable version of the temporal markup language, TimeML. We describe the changes and enrichments made, while framing the effort in a more general methodology of semantic annotation. In particular, we assume a principled distinction between the annotation of an expression and the representation which that annotation denotes. This involves not only the specification of an annotation language for a particular phenomenon, but also the development of a meta-model that allows one to interpret the syntactic expressions of the specification semantically.

This paper describes an ISO project which aims at developing a standard for annotating spoken and multimodal dialogue with semantic information concerning the communicative functions of utterances, the kind of semantic content they address, and their relations with what was said and done earlier in the dialogue. The project, ISO 24617-2 ""Semantic annotation framework, Part 2: Dialogue acts"", is currently at DIS stage. The proposed annotation schema distinguishes 9 orthogonal dimensions, allowing each functional segment in dialogue to have a function in each of these dimensions, thus accounting for the multifunctionality that utterances in dialogue often have. A number of core communicative functions is defined in the form of ISO data categories, available at http://semantic-annotation.uvt.nl/dialogue-acts/iso-datcats.pdf; they are divided into ""dimension-specific"" functions, which can be used only in a particular dimension, such as Turn Accept in the Turn Management dimension, and ""general-purpose"" functions, which can be used in any dimension, such as Inform and Request. An XML-based annotation language, ""DiAML"" is defined, with an abstract syntax, a semantics, and a concrete syntax.