What You Say and How You Say it: Joint Modeling of Topics and Discourse in Microblog Conversations

Jichuan Zeng, Jing Li, Yulan He, Cuiyun Gao, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King


Abstract
This paper presents an unsupervised framework for jointly modeling topic content and discourse behavior in microblog conversations. Concretely, we propose a neural model to discover word clusters indicating what a conversation concerns (i.e., topics) and those reflecting how participants voice their opinions (i.e., discourse).1 Extensive experiments show that our model can yield both coherent topics and meaningful discourse behavior. Further study shows that our topic and discourse representations can benefit the classification of microblog messages, especially when they are jointly trained with the classifier. Our data sets and code are available at: http://github.com/zengjichuan/Topic_Disc.
Anthology ID:
Q19-1017
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7
Month:
Year:
2019
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
267–281
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1017
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00267
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jichuan Zeng, Jing Li, Yulan He, Cuiyun Gao, Michael R. Lyu, and Irwin King. 2019. What You Say and How You Say it: Joint Modeling of Topics and Discourse in Microblog Conversations. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7:267–281.
Cite (Informal):
What You Say and How You Say it: Joint Modeling of Topics and Discourse in Microblog Conversations (Zeng et al., TACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1017.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1017.mp4
Code
 zengjichuan/Topic_Disc
Data
TWT-16