Fora: A corpus and framework for the study of facilitated dialogue

Hope Schroeder, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara


Abstract
Facilitated dialogue is increasingly popular as a method of civic engagement and as a method for gathering social insight, but resources for its study are scant. We present Fora, a unique collection of annotated facilitated dialogues. We compile 262 facilitated conversations that were hosted with partner organizations seeking to engage their members and surface insights regarding issues like education, elections, and public health, primarily through the sharing of personal experience. Alongside this corpus of 39,911 speaker turns, we present a framework for the analysis of facilitated dialogue. We taxonomize key personal sharing behaviors and facilitation strategies in the corpus, annotate a 25% sample (10,000+ speaker turns) of the data accordingly, and evaluate and establish baselines on a number of tasks essential to the identification of these phenomena in dialogue. We describe the data, and relate facilitator behavior to turn-taking and participant sharing. We outline how this research can inform future work in understanding and improving facilitated dialogue, parsing spoken conversation, and improving the behavior of dialogue agents.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.754
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13985–14001
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.754
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.754
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hope Schroeder, Deb Roy, and Jad Kabbara. 2024. Fora: A corpus and framework for the study of facilitated dialogue. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13985–14001, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fora: A corpus and framework for the study of facilitated dialogue (Schroeder et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.754.pdf