A survey of neural models for the automatic analysis of conversation: Towards a better integration of the social sciences
It addresses the gap in neural models for conversation analysis by incorporating social science perspectives, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper surveys neural architectures for analyzing conversation, such as emotion and dialogue act detection, and argues that current applications miss fundamental co-constructive aspects of conversation, proposing future integration with social science insights for better analysis and generation.
Some exciting new approaches to neural architectures for the analysis of conversation have been introduced over the past couple of years. These include neural architectures for detecting emotion, dialogue acts, and sentiment polarity. They take advantage of some of the key attributes of contemporary machine learning, such as recurrent neural networks with attention mechanisms and transformer-based approaches. However, while the architectures themselves are extremely promising, the phenomena they have been applied to to date are but a small part of what makes conversation engaging. In this paper we survey these neural architectures and what they have been applied to. On the basis of the social science literature, we then describe what we believe to be the most fundamental and definitional feature of conversation, which is its co-construction over time by two or more interlocutors. We discuss how neural architectures of the sort surveyed could profitably be applied to these more fundamental aspects of conversation, and what this buys us in terms of a better analysis of conversation and even, in the longer term, a better way of generating conversation for a conversational system.