Disentangling Approaches to Conversation Disentanglement: Fine-Tune or Learn from Scratch?
Debaditya Pal, Anton Leuski, Ron Artstein, David Traum, Kallirroi Georgila
Abstract
Conversation disentanglement is the process of segmenting a stream of messages or utterances into separate conversations or “threads” that can be more easily understood and processed. We compare the performance of GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini with deep learning models built from scratch for this task. We show that, using the same amount of training data, out-of-the-box GPT-4o performs poorly, and fine-tuning GPT-4o Mini results in performance comparable to learning small-size models from scratch (based on standard hand-crafted features for this task), with performance reaching 74.4% F1-score for prediction of links between messages and 45.3% F1-score for prediction of perfectly matching conversations. However, the fine-tuned GPT-4o Mini model underperforms when compared to models that utilize complex structural information. We also provide a new method for detailed analysis of the successes and failures of our models, and a new visualization method.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.lrec-1.229
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Palma de Mallorca, Spain
- Editors:
- Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA Language Resource Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2927–2941
- Language:
- External URL:
- https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-229
- DOI:
- 10.63317/3frwendckp7g
- Cite (ACL):
- Debaditya Pal, Anton Leuski, Ron Artstein, David Traum, and Kallirroi Georgila. 2026. Disentangling Approaches to Conversation Disentanglement: Fine-Tune or Learn from Scratch?. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2927–2941, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- Disentangling Approaches to Conversation Disentanglement: Fine-Tune or Learn from Scratch? (Pal et al., LREC 2026)