FML proposal and issues

Hi,

I'm a graduate student from the Univerity of Twente and am currently working on my master's thesis regarding a research subject which I did at USC/ISI in Marina Del Rey, CA. The research is about the influence of culture on nonverbal behavior generation in ECAs. I'm using the SAIBA framework for this and try to create different mappings from FML to BML depending on different influences like culture, age or gender.

I've developed an FML specification proposal which I'm using for my research. The basis for the specification is the FML specification developed at ISI. I've added and changed some elements and attributes to provide a broader range of communicative functions.
The specification is available here: http://home.student.utwente.nl/j.vanoijen/thesis/fml.pdf

To start of with a discussion point:

As I understand from the original FML specification, in contrast to APML, it was designed to separate the discourse structure tags (turn, topic, performative, etc) from additional tags that can further annotate semantic units inside the structure tags (emphasize, affect, etc). Now I was wondering how these additional tags could reference the content of the structure tags if these tags are supposed to be in a different location. I assume this location to be at the end of a performative or turn.

For example:

<turn id="t1" type="take">
<performative id="p1" type="enquiry">
<content id="c1">What are you doing here</content>
</performative>
</turn>

My issue is the placement of a tag used to emphaszie a word in the content. If it is placed at the end of the act, how to reference single words, especially if two identical words exist in the content. If the two types of tags are not separated and the emphasize tag would be placed around the word, it could get very messy if many of these additional tags surround words. For now I prefer the second option for simplicity, but perhaps when FML is used more, other solutions or issues may lead to better options.

If anyone has any comments or other issues, i'll be happy to hear them!

Cheers,
Joost van Oijen