Learning to Disentangle Interleaved Conversational Threads with a Siamese Hierarchical Network and Similarity Ranking

Jyun-Yu Jiang, Francine Chen, Yan-Ying Chen, Wei Wang


Abstract
An enormous amount of conversation occurs online every day, such as on chat platforms where multiple conversations may take place concurrently. Interleaved conversations lead to difficulties in not only following discussions but also retrieving relevant information from simultaneous messages. Conversation disentanglement aims to separate intermingled messages into detached conversations. In this paper, we propose to leverage representation learning for conversation disentanglement. A Siamese hierarchical convolutional neural network (SHCNN), which integrates local and more global representations of a message, is first presented to estimate the conversation-level similarity between closely posted messages. With the estimated similarity scores, our algorithm for conversation identification by similarity ranking (CISIR) then derives conversations based on high-confidence message pairs and pairwise redundancy. Experiments were conducted with four publicly available datasets of conversations from Reddit and IRC channels. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms comparative baselines in both pairwise similarity estimation and conversation disentanglement.
Anthology ID:
N18-1164
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1812–1822
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1164
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1164
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jyun-Yu Jiang, Francine Chen, Yan-Ying Chen, and Wei Wang. 2018. Learning to Disentangle Interleaved Conversational Threads with a Siamese Hierarchical Network and Similarity Ranking. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1812–1822, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Disentangle Interleaved Conversational Threads with a Siamese Hierarchical Network and Similarity Ranking (Jiang et al., NAACL 2018)
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https://aclanthology.org/N18-1164.pdf
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