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Olle of the goals of the Eu-funded MATE project is to develop tools to support some of the most popular dialogue coding activities, including annotation of syntactic information, information about'coreference,'and information about dialogue acts. 1 A problem to be confronted when trying to develop such tools is the lack of universally agreed upon coding schemes for these'levels'~-ie, of specifications of a set of elements and attributes that will cover all of the information about that level that a researcher may wish to annotate, together with instructions for how to do so. What does exist at the moment is coding schemes for particular domains and/or applications: in the case of dialogue acts, for example, there are several'specific'schemes for given applications, some of which have been shown to lead to reliable coding (Alexandersson et al., 1997; Carletta et al., 1997). Recently, attempts to come up with standards for a few of these levels have been made at workshops organized by the Discourse Resource Initiative (DRI). The DRI did come up with a proposal concerning the dialogue act level (Discourse Resource Initiative, 1997; Allen and Core, 1997), although there have been serious disagreements concerning the usefulness of such a'standard'for this level, since it's not clear that it's possible to come up with a domain-independent definition of dialogue acts. No official recommendation has been made in the DRI for the so-called'coreference'level, although the DRAMA scheme (Passonneau, 1997) has sometimes been discussed for this purpose. In this paper we report on the current proposal concerning the type of'coreference'annotation to be …