You Talking to Me? A Corpus and Algorithm for Conversation Disentanglement

When multiple conversations occur simultaneously, a listener must decide which conversation each utterance is part of in order to interpret and respond to it appropriately. We refer to this task as disentanglement. We present a corpus of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) dialogue in which the various conversations have been manually disentangled, and evaluate annotator reliability. This is, to our knowledge, the first such corpus for internet chat. We propose a graph-theoretic model for disentanglement, using discourse-based features which have not been previously applied to this task. The model's predicted disentanglements are highly correlated with manual annotations. 1 Motivation Simultaneous conversations seem to arise naturally in both informal social interactions and multi-party typed chat. Aoki et al. (2006)'s study of voice conversations among 8-10 people found an average of

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Micha Elsner, Eugene Charniak
• Keywords: ACL 2008, Computational Linguistics, Conversations, Motivation Simultaneous Conversations, Multiple Conversations