ISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation, established in 2012, has in the past few years been used both in corpus annotation and in the design of components for spoken and multimodal dialogue systems. This has brought some inaccuracies and undesirbale limitations of the standard to light, which are addressed in a proposed second edition. This second edition allows a more accurate annotation of dependence relations and rhetorical relations in dialogue. Following the ISO 24617-4 principles of semantic annotation, and borrowing ideas from EmotionML, a triple-layered plug-in mechanism is introduced which allows dialogue act descriptions to be enriched with information about their semantic content, about accompanying emotions, and other information, and allows the annotation scheme to be customised by adding application-specific dialogue act types.

This paper discusses the current state of developing an ISO standard annotation scheme for quantification phenomena in natural language, as part of the ISO Semantic Annotation Framework (ISO 24617). A proposed approach that combines ideas from the theory of generalised quantifiers and from neo-Davidsonian event semantics was adopted by the ISO organisation in 2019 as a starting point for developing such an annotation scheme. * This scheme consists of (1) a conceptual ‘metamodel’ that visualises the types of entities, functions and relations that go into annotations of quantification; (2) an abstract syntax which defines ‘annotation structures’ as triples and other set-theoretic constructs; (3) an XML-based representation of annotation structures (‘concrete syntax’); and (4) a compositional semantics of annotation structures. The latter three components together define the interpreted markup language QuantML. The focus in this paper is on the structuring of the semantic information needed to characterise quantification in natural language and the representation of these structures in QuantML.

Effective, professional and socially competent dialogue of health care providers with their patients is essential to best practice in medicine. To identify, categorize and quantify salient features of patient-provider communication, to model interactive processes in medical encounters and to design digital interactive medical services, two important instruments have been developed: (1) medical interaction analysis systems with the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS) as the most widely used by medical practitioners and (2) dialogue act annotation schemes with ISO 24617-2 as a multidimensional taxonomy of interoperable semantic concepts widely used for corpus annotation and dialogue systems design. Neither instrument fits all purposes. In this paper, we perform a systematic comparative analysis of the categories defined in the RIAS and ISO taxonomies. Overcoming the deficiencies and gaps that were found, we propose a number of extensions to the ISO annotation scheme, making it a powerful analytical and modelling instrument for the analysis, modelling and assessment of medical communication.