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

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.

Topic and genre in dialogue

In this paper we argue that topic plays a fundamental role in conversations, and that the concept is needed in addition to that of genre to define interactions. In particular, the concepts of genre and topic need to be separated and orthogonally defined. This would enable modular, reliable and controllable flexible-domain dialogue systems.