"Wait, did you mean the doctor?": Collecting a Dialogue Corpus for Topical Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new dialogue corpus collection method using a custom messaging tool to analyze topical organization and shifts in casual human conversations.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for collecting and annotating dialogue data specifically designed for topical analysis in casual conversations.

Findings

New dialogue corpus suitable for topical analysis

Method for collecting long conversations with topic shifts

Foundation for future research on topic recognition in dialogue

Abstract

Dialogue is at the core of human behaviour and being able to identify the topic at hand is crucial to take part in conversation. Yet, there are few accounts of the topical organisation in casual dialogue and of how people recognise the current topic in the literature. Moreover, analysing topics in dialogue requires conversations long enough to contain several topics and types of topic shifts. Such data is complicated to collect and annotate. In this paper we present a dialogue collection experiment which aims to build a corpus suitable for topical analysis. We will carry out the collection with a messaging tool we developed.