SRI's Amex Travel Agent Data

Introduction

For purposes of research into dialogue, particularly in the air travel domain used by the ATIS project , SRI audiotaped and transcribed conversations made at SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, between SRI International employees and American Express travel agents. The later transcripts omit portions of the tapes that were not relevant to the ATIS project, noting "[break in transcript]" where this occurs.

Jacqueline Kowtko prepared the original transcripts under the direction of Patti Price. Candy Sidner then edited the transcripts to remove identifying personal information like names and credit card numbers. Ruth Lang has done some additional editing of this kind. Harry Bratt wrote the automatic HTML formatter for these files.

Transcription Conventions

These are the original notes describing the conventions used in transcribing the tapes:

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF AIRLINE TAPE #1, 5/4/89

Note:   () enclose portions where two or more speakers are talking
	   simultaneously,
	 - means the speaker corrected or switched sentences,
	?? means I'm not sure of the word,
       X/Y means I'm not sure whether X or Y was what was really said,

       Commas used rather inconsistently.
       There's a space between lines whenever the speaker switches.

	[] encloses laugh or sigh,
       ,,, signifies pause,
       xxx means some nonsense sound(s)

Transcriptions

The tapes were transcribed with explicitly noting which utterances belonged to the agent and which did not, as well as noting when a new call started. Because this information was present in the original ascii text file, we were able to automatically parse and format these files in html to make them a bit more readable, and to allow indexing by call. Links to the original ascii versions are below this table. Please note that the date of recording for tapes 17-18 and 20-21 is no longer available and appears as 0 in the table below.

Here are links to all of the ascii transcriptions corresponding to the html versions in the table above.

Research Based on these Transcripts

• Chu-Carroll, Jennifer and Michael K. Brown. 1997. "Tracking Initiative in Collaborative Dialogue Interactions" . Paper presented at ACL/EACL '97. Available as cmp-lg/9704005.
• Kowtko, J. and Price, P. 1989. Data collection and analysis in the air travel planning domain. In Proceedings of DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, October 1989.
• Oh, A. H. and Rudnicky, A. Stochastic language generation for spoken dialogue systems. ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop on Coversational Systems, May 2000, pp. 27-32.
• Qu, Yan and Steve Beale. A Constraint-Based Model for Cooperative Response Generation in Information Dialogues. Copyright AAAI. In Proceedings of AAAI-99, Orlando, FL, July 1999.
• Shriberg, Elizabeth. 1994. Preliminaries to a Theory of Speech Disfluencies Ph.D. thesis, Cognitive Psychology, University of California at Berkeley Thesis.   postscript   pdf
• Sidner, C. L. 1994. Negotiation in Collaborative Activity: A Discourse Analysis. Knowledge-Based Systems, Vol. 7, No. 4.