A Unified Supervised and Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation Framework Based on Utterance Pair Modeling

Shihao Yang, Ziyi Zhang, Yue Jiang, Chunsheng Qin, Shuhua Liu


Abstract
The Dialogue Topic Segmentation task aims to divide a dialogue into different topic paragraphs in order to better understand the structure and content of the dialogue. Due to the short sentences, serious references and non-standard language in the dialogue, it is difficult to determine the boundaries of the topic. Although the unsupervised approaches based on LLMs performs well, it is still difficult to surpass the supervised methods based on classical models in specific domains. To this end, this paper proposes UPS (Utterance Pair Segment), a dialogue topic segmentation method based on utterance pair relationship modeling, unifying the supervised and unsupervised network architectures. For supervised pre-training, the model predicts the adjacency and topic affiliation of utterances in dialogues. For unsupervised pre-training, the dialogue-level and utterance-level relationship prediction tasks are used to train the model. The pre-training and fine-tuning strategies are carried out in different scenarios, such as supervised, few-shot, and unsupervised data. By adding a domain adapter and a task adapter to the Transformer, the model learns in the pre-training and fine-tuning stages, respectively, which significantly improves the segmentation effect. As the result, the proposed method has achieved the best results on multiple benchmark datasets across various scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.252
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4898–4908
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.252/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shihao Yang, Ziyi Zhang, Yue Jiang, Chunsheng Qin, and Shuhua Liu. 2025. A Unified Supervised and Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation Framework Based on Utterance Pair Modeling. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4898–4908, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Unified Supervised and Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation Framework Based on Utterance Pair Modeling (Yang et al., NAACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.252.pdf