Recent advance in digital storage technology has enabled us to archive more than 1,700 hours of video data from a daily Japanese news show in the last nine years. In this paper, to effectively make use of the video data in the archive, we first present a news video structuring method based on the chronological semantic relations between stories, namely the “topic thread structure”. Next, we int...

We are modeling roles of individual messages and participants in Q&A discussion forums. In this paper, we present a mixed network model that represents message exchanges and message influences within a discussion thread. We first model individual message roles and thread-level user roles using discussion content features. We then combine the resulting message roles and the user roles to generat...

Thread disentanglement is the task of separating out conversations whose thread structure is implicit, distorted, or lost. In this paper, we perform email thread disentanglement through pairwise classification, using text similarity measures on non-quoted texts in emails. We show that i) content text similarity metrics outperform style and structure text similarity metrics in both a class-balan...

Conversation Theory and a dynamic protolanguage, Lp, are used to illustrate an al'gulllent in favour of reflective and relativistic theories in Cybernetics and Systems Studies.

We investigate the interaction of power, gender, and language use in the Enron email corpus. We present a freely available extension to the Enron corpus, with the gender of senders of 87% messages reliably identified. Using this data, we test two specific hypotheses drawn from the sociolinguistic literature pertaining to gender and power: women managers use face-saving communicative strategies,...

We are building a broadcast news video archive where topics of interest can be retrieved and tracked easily. This paper introduces a structuring method applied to the accumulated news videos. First they are segmented into topic units and then threaded according to their mutual relations. A user interface for topic thread-based news video retrieval is also introduced. Since the topic thread stru...

We need to analyse a large number of e-mails sent by the citizens to the customer services department of a governmental organisation based in Sweden. To carry out this analysis we clustered a large number of e-mails with the aim of automatic e-mail answering. One issue that came up was whether we should use the whole e-mail including the thread or just the original query for the clustering. In ...

Adjacency pair recognition, a necessary component of discussion thread reconstruction, is the task of recognizing reply-to relations between pairs of discussion turns. Previously, dialogue act classification and metadata-based features have been shown useful in adjacency pair recognition. However, for certain forums such as Wikipedia discussions, metadata is not available, and existing dialogue...

Online discussion forums have become a popular medium for users to discuss with and seek information from other users having similar interests. A typical discussion thread consists of a sequence of posts posted by multiple users. All the posts in a thread are not equally useful and serve a different purpose providing different types of information (some posts contain questions, some answers, et...