"Wait, did you mean the doctor?": Collecting a Dialogue Corpus for Topical Analysis
This addresses a gap in dialogue analysis for researchers, but it is incremental as it focuses on data collection rather than novel methods.
The paper tackles the lack of data for analyzing topics in casual dialogue by collecting a corpus using a custom messaging tool, aiming to enable research on topical organization and recognition.
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.