Leo Muckley


2022

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An Empirical Study of Topic Transition in Dialogue
Mayank Soni | Brendan Spillane | Leo Muckley | Orla Cooney | Emer Gilmartin | Christian Saam | Benjamin Cowan | Vincent Wade
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

Although topic transition has been studied in dialogue for decades, only a handful of corpora based quantitative studies have been conducted to investigate the nature of topic transitions. Towards this end, this study annotates 215 conversations from the switchboard corpus, perform quantitative analysis and finds that 1) longer conversations consists of more topic transitions, 2) topic transition are usually lead by one participant and 3) we found no pattern in time series progression of topic transition. We also model topic transition with a precision of 91%.