An Empirical Study of Topic Transition in Dialogue

Mayank Soni, Brendan Spillane, Leo Muckley, Orla Cooney, Emer Gilmartin, Christian Saam, Benjamin Cowan, Vincent Wade


Abstract
Although topic transition has been studied in dialogue for decades, only a handful of corpora based quantitative studies have been conducted to investigate the nature of topic transitions. Towards this end, this study annotates 215 conversations from the switchboard corpus, perform quantitative analysis and finds that 1) longer conversations consists of more topic transitions, 2) topic transition are usually lead by one participant and 3) we found no pattern in time series progression of topic transition. We also model topic transition with a precision of 91%.
Anthology ID:
2022.codi-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea and Online
Editors:
Chloe Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Sharid Loaiciga, Michael Strube, Amir Zeldes
Venue:
CODI
SIG:
Publisher:
International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
92–99
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.codi-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mayank Soni, Brendan Spillane, Leo Muckley, Orla Cooney, Emer Gilmartin, Christian Saam, Benjamin Cowan, and Vincent Wade. 2022. An Empirical Study of Topic Transition in Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, pages 92–99, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea and Online. International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Empirical Study of Topic Transition in Dialogue (Soni et al., CODI 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.codi-1.12.pdf