Louis, Annie P and Cohen, Shay B (2015) Conversation Trees: A Grammar Model for Topic Structure in Forums. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 7-21 Sept 2015, Lisbon.
Louis, Annie P and Cohen, Shay B (2015) Conversation Trees: A Grammar Model for Topic Structure in Forums. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 7-21 Sept 2015, Lisbon.
Louis, Annie P and Cohen, Shay B (2015) Conversation Trees: A Grammar Model for Topic Structure in Forums. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 7-21 Sept 2015, Lisbon.
Abstract
Online forum discussions proceed differently from face-to-face conversations and any single thread on an online forum contains posts on different subtopics. This work aims to characterize the content of a forum thread as a conversation tree of topics. We present models that jointly per- form two tasks: segment a thread into sub- parts, and assign a topic to each part. Our core idea is a definition of topic structure using probabilistic grammars. By leveraging the flexibility of two grammar formalisms, Context-Free Grammars and Linear Context-Free Rewriting Systems, our models create desirable structures for forum threads: our topic segmentation is hierarchical, links non-adjacent segments on the same topic, and jointly labels the topic during segmentation. We show that our models outperform a number of tree generation baselines.
Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science |
Divisions: | Faculty of Science and Health > Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, School of |
Depositing User: | Jim Jamieson |
Date Deposited: | 13 Dec 2016 16:15 |
Last Modified: | 13 Dec 2016 16:16 |
URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/18541 |
Available files
Filename: D15-1178.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0