We propose a novel coherence model for written asynchronous conversations (e.g., forums, emails), and show its applications in coherence assessment and thread reconstruction tasks. We conduct our research in two steps. First, we propose improvements to the recently proposed neural entity grid model by lexicalizing its entity transitions. Then, we extend the model to asynchronous conversations by incorporating the underlying conversational structure in the entity grid representation and feature computation. Our model achieves state of the art results on standard coherence assessment tasks in monologue and conversations outperforming existing models. We also demonstrate its effectiveness in reconstructing thread structures.

We propose a local coherence model based on a convolutional neural network that operates over the entity grid representation of a text. The model captures long range entity transitions along with entity-specific features without loosing generalization, thanks to the power of distributed representation. We present a pairwise ranking method to train the model in an end-to-end fashion on a task and learn task-specific high level features. Our evaluation on three different coherence assessment tasks demonstrates that our model achieves state of the art results outperforming existing models by a good margin.