Site OptionsThis USC account carries several functionally distinct websites. You may choose among these options:
- A Website on Dialogue Macrogame Theory
It contains the only full presentation of Dialogue Macrogame Theory, (DMT). DMT is a structured descriptive approach to discovering the succession structure of natural human dialogues, sometimes called dialogue dynamics. It embodies some strong assumptions about how certain kinds of dialogues, and it enables testing of those assumptions by repeated application of dialogue annotation, relying on the annotator's subjective understanding of dialogue records. The class of dialogues includes "task oriented" dialogues but is larger.
- The Dialogue Diversity Corpus
This a new corpus for public use. The purpose of this corpus, DDC, is to facilitate research that addresses a wide range of dialogue situations, including variation in physical situation, the social roles of participants, the status of the participants, the prior knowledge that the participants have of each other, and (in a few cases) the variety of English that they use.
The corpus has two parts. One presents a small number of dialogues from each of a wide range of situations. The other shows that a large amount of usable dialogue data is available, and gives directions and links that can help the researchers who need it to find it.
It was announced in October 2002, and significantly expanded in September 2003.
- Bill Mann's Linguistic Website
This is my personal linguistic site, recently reconciled to the others and revised. This site reflects a broader scope of interests than simply dialogue or RST.
This entire website is under copyright © by William C. Mann, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003