Visualizing the Flow of Discourse with a Concept Ontology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for visualizing discourse flow by extracting concepts from discussions using a Wikipedia-based ontology, aiding understanding of how concepts are discussed over time.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach that adapts Wikipedia's category hierarchy as a concept ontology for discourse visualization, outperforming several existing methods.

Findings

Our method achieved better results than four strong alternatives.

The visualization effectively illustrates discourse flows.

User study confirms improved understanding of discussion dynamics.

Abstract

Understanding and visualizing human discourse has long being a challenging task. Although recent work on argument mining have shown success in classifying the role of various sentences, the task of recognizing concepts and understanding the ways in which they are discussed remains challenging. Given an email thread or a transcript of a group discussion, our task is to extract the relevant concepts and understand how they are referenced and re-referenced throughout the discussion. In the present work, we present a preliminary approach for extracting and visualizing group discourse by adapting Wikipedia's category hierarchy to be an external concept ontology. From a user study, we found that our method achieved better results than 4 strong alternative approaches, and we illustrate our visualization method based on the extracted discourse flows.