ADAPT Researchers have recently had a paper accepted at CODI 2022, COLING, the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse. The paper is titled ‘An Empirical Study of Topic Transition in Dialogue’.
Transitioning between topics is a natural component of human dialog and while topic transition has been studied in dialogue for decades, only a small number of corpora based quantitative studies have been conducted to investigate the nature of topic transitions. The work outlined in this paper presents an empirical study on topic transition in switchboard corpus followed by modelling topic transition with a precision of 91% for in-domain(id) test set and 78% on 10 out-of-domain (ood) test set. It is anticipated that this work will help in emulating human-human like topic transition in open domain dialog systems.
The research was co-authored by Mayank Soni (PhD Student, Trinity College Dublin), Dr. Brendan Spillane (Research Fellow, Trinity College Dublin), Dr. Emer Gilmartin (Postdoctoral Researcher, Trinity College Dublin), Christian Saam (Research Fellow, Trinity College Dublin), Dr. Benjamin Cowan (Assistant Professor, University College Dublin), and Prof. Vincent Wade (Director of the ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin).
A topic-transition annotated dataset is being released as part of this paper. The full paper is available here.
