The article gives an overview of a Master's
thesis defended in the spring of 2004. The aim of the thesis
was to annotate a collection of dialogues from the Estonian Dialogue
Corpus (EDiC) using Kristiina Jokinen's theory of communicative
strategies, compare two annotating systems (one based on dialogue
acts and the other on communicative strategies) and analyse the
tasks performed by the communicative strategies. The analysis
proved the initial guess that there is a certain agreement between
the acts and strategies, e.g. the finish/start strategy is used
in response to various questions and requests. From the point
of view of EDiC development it was necessary to find out whether
that kind of two-layer dialogue tagging could facilitate the
composing of the dialogue system. As a result it can be affirmed
that both dialogue acts and communicative strategies are necessary
layers: the multiple acts are necessary to define the initial
parts and detailed structure of the dialogues, while the few
strategies would help the computer to understand the users' questions
and to generate the answers.
