(Optional) tone enhancement

[brandomr]

What functionality will your new tokens add?
By providing optional tonal modifiers to DAIDE statements DAIDE can be made more expressive and closer aligned to human language. Invariably in real negotiations, tone is conveyed either mechanistically through verbal intonation, through word selection, or a combination of the two. The proposed modifiers support the latter.

Describe the precise changes you'd like
Currently we support the following tones:

• Objective
• Hostile
• Friendly
• Fearful
• Confident
• Empathetic
• Upset

In our version of the game engine these are not treated as additional tokens in DAIDE but rather external modifiers. For example:

FRM (AUS) (ENG) (PRP (XDO ((ENG FLT LON) MTO WAL)))

would be modified by one of the tones. This could be embedded into DAIDE itself:

HOSTILE: FRM (AUS) (ENG) (PRP (XDO ((ENG FLT LON) MTO WAL)))

or

CONFIDENT: FRM (AUS) (ENG) (PRP (XDO ((ENG FLT LON) MTO WAL)))

or these tones could be treated separately altogether.

Additional context
From Jataware's standpoint tones should be ignored by teams that do not wish to support them, but if others are interested in using them we should have a broader discussion about whether this should be included as an addendum to DAIDE or whether we should treat tone separately (as we do currently).

For reference, our module that converts DAIDE + tone to human language can be found here.

[ezubaric]

This could be a diverting question, but why not just attach the human-readable conversion as a free text elaboration? This would give more flexibility in the future and would let more nuanced conversions be reflected.

[mjspeck]

@brandomr this issue might be stale, both because per the meeting on July 20th, it makes more sense to just add tone tokens, and also per Jataware's update at the more recent meeting that you might not be including tone at all in upcoming data collection.

[jmell]

@ezubaric My understanding is that the tokens are handy for those of us who are not interested in NLU from human-readable to DAIDE. Is this issue still active?

[ezubaric]

@brandomr

It seems like given Jataware is not gathering tone at all, while a free text field would be more consistent with their current plan for data collection.