Response Acts in Chinese Conversation: the Coding Scheme and Analysis

Speech act is an important means of transmitting and understanding intention in conversational interaction. In this paper, we outline the updated coding scheme for responses in terms of their lexico-grammatical forms and communicative functions toward question-response system in Chinese conversations. We obtained the distributional patterns of the responses based on 1171 conversations from 4 scenarios (15 domains) in corpus of DISCOURSE-CASS. In terms of response forms across 4 scenarios, phrases and words account for 65$\sim$88$%; in terms of response functions, at least 35% responses are transformative responses or no answers. The results indicate that dominated syntactic form is minor phrase, and the intentions should be inferred from context including contextual prosody.