In this paper, we propose a new scheme for annotating response tokens (RTs) and their triggering expressions in Japanese multi-party conversations. In the proposed scheme, RTs are first identified and classified according to their forms, and then sub-classified according to their sequential positions in the discourse. To deeply study the contexts in which RTs are used, the scheme also provides procedures for annotating triggering expressions, which are considered to trigger the listener's production of RTs. RTs are classified according to whether or not there is a particular object or proposition in the speaker's turn for which the listener shows a positive or aligned stance. Triggering expressions are then identified in the speaker's turn; they include surprising facts and other newsworthy things, opinions and assessments, focus of a response to a question or repair initiation, keywords in narratives, and embedded propositions quoted from other's statement or thought, which are to be agreed upon, assessed, or noticed. As an illustrative application of our scheme, we present a preliminary analysis on the distribution of the latency of the listener's response to the triggering expression, showing how it differs according to RT's forms and positions.

In this paper, we propose a scheme for annotating utterance-level units in Japanese dialogs, which emerged from an analysis of the interrelationship among four schemes, i) inter-pausal units, ii) intonation units, iii) clause units, and iv) pragmatic units. The associations among the labels of these four units were illustrated by multiple correspondence analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis. Based on these results, we prescribe utterance-unit identification rules, which identify two sorts of utterance-units with different granularities: short and long utterance-units. Short utterance-units are identified by acoustic and prosodic disjuncture, and they are considered to constitute units of speaker's planning and hearer's understanding. Long utterance-units, on the other hand, are recognized by syntactic and pragmatic disjuncture, and they are regarded as units of interaction. We explore some characteristics of these utterance-units, focusing particularly on unit duration and syntactic property, other participants' responses, and mismatch between the two-levels. We also discuss how our two-level utterance-units are useful in analyzing cognitive and communicative aspects of spoken dialogs.