S Vishal


2017

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Information Bottleneck Inspired Method For Chat Text Segmentation
S Vishal | Mohit Yadav | Lovekesh Vig | Gautam Shroff
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a novel technique for segmenting chat conversations using the information bottleneck method (Tishby et al., 2000), augmented with sequential continuity constraints. Furthermore, we utilize critical non-textual clues such as time between two consecutive posts and people mentions within the posts. To ascertain the effectiveness of the proposed method, we have collected data from public Slack conversations and Fresco, a proprietary platform deployed inside our organization. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method yields an absolute (relative) improvement of as high as 3.23% (11.25%). To facilitate future research, we are releasing manual annotations for segmentation on public Slack conversations.