Visualizing the Flow of Discourse with a Concept Ontology
This work addresses the challenge of understanding and visualizing discourse flow for applications like email threads or group discussions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing argument mining and ontology methods.
The paper tackled the problem of extracting and visualizing concepts in group discourse by adapting Wikipedia's category hierarchy as an external ontology, achieving better results than 4 alternative approaches in a user study.
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.