The purposes behind an utterance are very complex. This dimension characterizes what effect an utterance has on the subsequent dialogue and interaction. For instance, as the result of an utterance, is the speaker now committed to certain beliefs, or to performing certain future actions? Note it is often difficult to determine what actions the speaker intended to perform with an utterance. Also the effect that an utterance has on the subsequent interaction may differ from what the speaker initially intended by the utterance. For this reason, annotators are allowed to look ahead in the dialog to determine the effect an utterance has on the dialog. Note, there are several decision trees presented in this section that instruct annotators on how to make labeling decisions. The decision trees ask questions about the speaker's actions but the annotator may need to see how the listener responds to the speaker in order to determine what the speaker's actions were.
Often, there are many different effects simultaneously achieved by an utterance. To allow for this, the coding in this dimension allows eight different aspects of every utterance to be coded. Specific constraints on how many aspects you can code at a time and the criteria for choosing between cases where several seem applicable will be specified in the domain-specific annotation instructions. As a default case, you can assume that you should code all aspects that are applicable.
Forward Looking Function