@inproceedings{luu-malamud-2020-non,
    title = "Non-Topical Coherence in Social Talk: A Call for Dialogue Model Enrichment",
    author = "Luu, Alex  and
      Malamud, Sophia A.",
    editor = "Rijhwani, Shruti  and
      Liu, Jiangming  and
      Wang, Yizhong  and
      Dror, Rotem",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2020.acl-srw.17/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.acl-srw.17",
    pages = "118--133",
    abstract = "Current models of dialogue mainly focus on utterances within a topically coherent discourse segment, rather than new-topic utterances (NTUs), which begin a new topic not correlating with the content of prior discourse. As a result, these models may sufficiently account for discourse context of task-oriented but not social conversations. We conduct a pilot annotation study of NTUs as a first step towards a model capable of rationalizing conversational coherence in social talk. We start with the naturally occurring social dialogues in the Disco-SPICE corpus, annotated with discourse relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank and Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations frameworks. We first annotate content-based coherence relations that are not available in Disco-SPICE, and then heuristically identify NTUs, which lack a coherence relation to prior discourse. Based on the interaction between NTUs and their discourse context, we construct a classification for NTUs that actually convey certain non-topical coherence in social talk. This classification introduces new sequence-based social intents that traditional taxonomies of speech acts do not capture. The new findings advocates the development of a Bayesian game-theoretic model for social talk."
}