Improving conversational proficiency is a key target for students learning a new language. While acquiring conversational proficiency, students must learn the linguistic mechanisms of Repair and Grounding (R&G) to negotiate meaning and find common ground with their interlocutor so conversational breakdowns can be resolved. Task-oriented Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) have long been sought as a tool to hone conversational proficiency. However, the R&G patterns for language learners interacting with a task-oriented spoken dialogue system are not reflected explicitly in any existing datasets. Therefore, to move the needle in Spoken Dialogue Systems for language learning we present GrounDialog: an annotated dataset of spoken conversations where we elicit a rich set of R&G patterns.

We show how the general fine-grained opinion mining concepts of opinion target and opinion expression are related to aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) and discuss their benefits for resource creation over popular ABSA annotation schemes. Specifically, we first discuss why opinions modeled solely in terms of (entity, aspect) pairs inadequately captures the meaning of the sentiment originally expressed by authors and how opinion expressions and opinion targets can be used to avoid the loss of information. We then design a meaning-preserving annotation scheme and apply it to two popular ABSA datasets, the 2016 SemEval ABSA Restaurant and Laptop datasets. Finally, we discuss the importance of opinion expressions and opinion targets for next-generation ABSA systems. We make our datasets publicly available for download.