Time pressure and topic negotiation may impose constraints on how people leverage discourse relations (DRs) in spontaneous conversational contexts. In this work, we adapt a system of DRs for written language to spontaneous dialogue using crowdsourced annotations from novice annotators. We then test whether discourse relations are used differently across several types of multi-utterance contexts. We compare the patterns of DR annotation within and across speakers and within and across turns. Ultimately, we find that different discourse contexts produce distinct distributions of discourse relations, with single-turn annotations creating the most uncertainty for annotators. Additionally, we find that the discourse relation annotations are of sufficient quality to predict from embeddings of discourse units.

翻译：时间压力与话题协商可能对人们如何在自发对话语境中利用语篇关系施加约束。本研究基于非专业标注者的众包标注，将一套针对书面语言的语篇关系体系改编应用于自发对话。随后，我们检验语篇关系在多种多话语语境中是否存在使用差异，并比较了同一说话者内、不同说话者间以及话轮内外的语篇关系标注模式。最终发现，不同语篇语境会产生不同的语篇关系分布，其中单一话轮标注给标注者带来的不确定性最大。此外，我们观察到，语篇关系标注的质量足以从语篇单元的嵌入表示中进行预测。