With a Little Help from my (Linguistic) Friends: Topic Segmentation of Multi-party Casual Conversations

Topics play an important role in the global organisation of a conversation as what is currently discussed constrains the possible contributions of the participant. Understanding the way topics are organised in interaction would provide insight on the structure of dialogue beyond the sequence of utterances. However, studying this high-level structure is a complex task that we try to approach by first segmenting dialogues into smaller topically coherent sets of utterances. Understanding the interactions between these segments would then enable us …

beyond conversation conversations cs.cl dialogue global insight organisation role segmentation topics understanding