With a Little Help from my (Linguistic) Friends: Topic segmentation of multi-party casual conversations

Amandine Decker, Maxime Amblard


Abstract
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 to propose a model of topic organisation at a dialogue level. In this paper we work with open-domain conversations and try to reach a comparable level of accuracy as recent machine learning based topic segmentation models but with a formal approach. The features we identify as meaningful for this task help us understand better the topical structure of a conversation.
Anthology ID:
2024.codi-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2024)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julians, Malta
Editors:
Michael Strube, Chloe Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Sharid Loaiciga, Amir Zeldes, Chuyuan Li
Venues:
CODI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
177–188
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.codi-1.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amandine Decker and Maxime Amblard. 2024. With a Little Help from my (Linguistic) Friends: Topic segmentation of multi-party casual conversations. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2024), pages 177–188, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
With a Little Help from my (Linguistic) Friends: Topic segmentation of multi-party casual conversations (Decker & Amblard, CODI-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.codi-1.16.pdf
Supplementary material:
 2024.codi-1.16.SupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.codi-1.16.mp4