• Corpus ID: 61395878

A classification scheme for annotating speech acts in a business email corpus

@article{Felice2013ACS,
  title={A classification scheme for annotating speech acts in a business email corpus},
  author={Rachele De Felice and John Darby and Alison Fisher and David Peplow},
  journal={ICAME Journal},
  year={2013}
}

• R. D. Felice, J. Darby, +1 author D. Peplow
• Published 1 April 2013
• Linguistics
• ICAME Journal

This paper reports on the process of manual annotation of speech acts in a corpus
of business emails, in the context of the PROBE project (PRagmatics of
Business English). The project aims to bring together corpus, computational,
and theoretical linguistics by drawing on the insights made available by the
annotated corpus. The corpus data sheds light on the linguistic and discourse
structures of speech act use in business email communication. This enhanced
linguistic description can be compared to theoretical linguistic representations
of speech act categories to assess how well traditional distinctions relate to
real-world, naturally occurring data. From a computational perspective, the
annotated data is required for the development of an automated speech act tagging
tool. Central to this research is the creation of a high quality, manually
annotated speech act corpus, using an easily interpretable classification
scheme. We discuss the scheme chosen for the project and the training guidelines
given to the annotators, and describe the main challenges identified by the
annotators.