Participant Subjectivity and Involvement As a Basis for Discourse Segmentation

Citation

Niekrasz John, Moore Johanna. Participant Subjectivity and Involvement As a Basis for Discourse Segmentation, in Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference: The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 54-61, 2009.

Abstract

We propose a framework for analyzing episodic conversational activities in terms of expressed relationships between the participants and utterance content. We test the hypothesis that linguistic features which express such properties, e.g. tense, aspect, and person deixis, are a useful basis for automatic intentional discourse segmentation. We present a novel algorithm and test our hypothesis on a set of intentionally segmented conversational monologues. Our algorithm performs better than a simple baseline and as well as or better than well-known lexical-semantic segmentation methods.


Read more from SRI

  • surgeons around a surgical robot

    The SRI research behind today’s surgical robotics

    Intuitive’s da Vinci 5 system represents a major leap in robotic-assisted medicine. It all started at SRI, which continues to advance teleoperation technologies.

  • a collage of digital graphs

    A banner year for quantum

    SRI-managed QED-C’s annual report on quantum trends captures an industry accelerating rapidly from technical promise toward major global impact.

  • ICE Cube containing SRI’s aerogel experiment, photographed prior to launch. Source: Aerospace Applications North America

    An SRI carbon capture experiment launches into space

    By synthesizing carbon-absorbing aerogels in microgravity, SRI research will give us a rare glimpse into how these materials could be radically improved.