本书以经过词性标注的Switchboard Dialogue Act Corpus为数据基础，考察英语日常对话中评价功能的语言使用特点，在评价功能与其使用特点间建立对应关系，用数据说明“多大程度上可以将评价功能与非评价功能区分开”，为其自动识别提供语言知识和数据支持。

Preface
Part I Introduction, Literature Review, and Methodo
logy
Chapter I Introduction
1.1 Rationale: The Study of Assessments in Interactive Speech
1.2 From Speech Act to Dialogue Act
1.3 Rationale: The Study of Daily Conversations
1.4 Corpus-based Approach
1.5 Motivations
1.6 Organization of the Book
Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Assessments Examined from a Qualitative Perspective
2.2 Assessments Examined from a Quantitative Perspective
2.2.1 Assessments m TRAINS
2.2.2 Assessments m SWBD-DAMSL
2.2.3 Assessments in ICSI-MRDA
2.2.4 Assessments in AMI
2.2.5 Assessments m DIT ++release
2.2.6 Assessments m SPAADIA
2.2.7 Assessments m ISO 24617-2 (2012)
2.2.8 Summary
2.3 Summary
Chapter 3 Methodology
3.1 Weakness in Previous Studies
3.2 Research Questions
3.3 Corpus Resources
3.3.1 Switchboard Dialogue Act (SwDA) Corpus
3.3.2 Third version of Switchboard
3.4 Methods
3.5 Data Pre-proeessing
Part II Identifying Linguistic Forms
Chapter 4 Classification of Assessments
4.1 Use of Penn Treebank Annotation
4.2 Observations
4.3 Subcategories
4.3.1 Interjections
4.3.2 Nominal phrases
4.3.3 Adjective phrases
4.3.4 Prepositional phrases
4.3.5 Adverb phrases
4.4 Summary
Chapter 5 Classification of Clauses
5.1 Overview
5.2 Utterances with Overt Subjects
5.2.1 Declaratives
5.2.2 Exelamatives
5.2.3 Interrogatives
5.3 Utterances without an Overt Subject
5.3.1 Subject ellipsis
5.3.2 Imperatives
5.4 Summary
Chapter 6 Consolidated Look
6.1 Overview
6.2 Adjective Phrases Used for Assessment Meaning
6.2.1 Review
6.2.2 Assessment adjectives in the current dataset
6.3 Nominal Phrases for Assessment Meaning
6.4 Clauses and Other Categories for Assessment Meaning
6.5 Discussion and Summary
Part III Conclusion
Chapter 7 Conclusions
7.1 Conclusions
7.2 Future Work
Appendix 1 DA Tags in SwDA Corpus
Appendix 2 POS Tags in Penn Treebank
Appendix 3 Problematic Cases in Tagging
Appendix 4 Problematic Cases in Transcripts
Bibliography