Fundamental frequency height as a resource for the management of overlap in talk-in-interaction.

Overlapping talk is common in talk-in-interaction. Much of the previous research on this topic agrees that speaker overlaps can be either turn competitive or noncompetitive. An investigation of the differences in prosodic design between these two classes of overlaps can offer insight into how speakers use and orient to prosody as a resource for turn competition. In this paper, we investigate the role of fundamental frequency (F0) as a resource for turn competition in overlapping speech. Our methodological approach combines detailed conversation analysis of overlap instances with acoustic measurements of F0 in the overlapping sequence and in its local context. The analyses are based on a collection of overlap instances drawn from the ICSI Meeting corpus. We found that overlappers mark an overlapping incoming as competitive by raising F0 above their norm for turn beginnings, and retaining this higher F0 until the point of overlap resolution. Overlappees may respond to these competitive incomings by returning competition, in which case they raise their F0 too. Our results thus provide instrumental support for earlier claims made on impressionistic evidence, namely that participants in talk-in-interaction systematically manipulate F0 height when competing for the turn

The SENSEI Annotated Corpus: Human Summaries of Reader Comment Conversations in On-line News

Researchers are beginning to explore how to generate summaries of extended argumentative conversations in social media, such as those found in reader comments in on-line news. To date, however, there has been little discussion of what these summaries should be like and a lack of humanauthored exemplars, quite likely because writing summaries of this kind of interchange is so difficult. In this paper we propose one type of reader comment summary – the conversation overview summary – that aims to capture the key argumentative content of a reader comment conversation. We describe a method we have developed to support humans in authoring conversation overview summaries and present a publicly available corpus – the first of its kind – of news articles plus comment sets, each multiply annotated, according to our method, with conversation overview summaries

What's the issue here?: Task-based evaluation of reader comment summarization systems

Automatic summarization of reader comments in on-line news is an extremely challenging task and a capability for which there is a clear need. Work to date has focussed on producing extractive summaries using well-known techniques imported from other areas of language processing. But are extractive summaries of comments what users really want? Do they support users in performing the sorts of tasks they are likely to want to perform with reader comments? In this paper we address these questions by doing three things. First, we offer a specification of one possible summary type for reader comment, based on an analysis of reader comment in terms of issues and viewpoints. Second, we define a task-based evaluation framework for reader comment summarization that allows summarization systems to be assessed in terms of how well they support users in a time-limited task of identifying issues and characterising opinion on issues in comments. Third, we describe a pilot evaluation in which we used the task-based evaluation framework to evaluate a prototype reader comment clustering and summarization system, demonstrating the viability of the evaluation framework and illustrating the sorts of insight such an evaluation affords

A Graph-Based Approach to Topic Clustering for Online Comments to News

This paper investigates graph-based approaches to labeled topic clustering of reader comments in online news. For graph-based clustering we propose a linear regression model of similarity between the graph nodes (comments) based on similarity features and weights trained using automatically derived training data. To label the clusters our graph-based approach makes use of DBPedia to abstract topics extracted from the clusters. We evaluate the clustering approach against gold standard data created by human annotators and compare its results against LDA – currently reported as the best method for the news comment clustering task. Evaluation of cluster labelling is set up as a retrieval task, where human annotators are asked to identify the best cluster given a cluster label. Our clustering approach significantly outperforms the LDA baseline and our evaluation of abstract cluster labels shows that graph-based approaches are a promising method of creating labeled clusters of news comments, although we still find cases where the automatically generated abstractive labels are insufficient to allow humans to correctly associate a label with its cluster

Automatic Label Generation for News Comment Clusters

We present a supervised approach to automat- ically labelling topic clusters of reader com- ments to online news. We use a feature set that includes both features capturing proper- ties local to the cluster and features that cap- ture aspects from the news article and from comments outside the cluster. We evaluate the approach in an automatic and a manual, task-based setting. Both evaluations show the approach to outperform a baseline method, which uses tf*idf to select comment-internal terms for use as topic labels. We illustrate how cluster labels can be used to generate cluster summaries and present two alternative sum- mary formats: a pie chart summary and an ab- stractive summary

Automatic Label Generation for News Comment Clusters

We present a supervised approach to automat- ically labelling topic clusters of reader com- ments to online news. We use a feature set that includes both features capturing proper- ties local to the cluster and features that cap- ture aspects from the news article and from comments outside the cluster. We evaluate the approach in an automatic and a manual, task-based setting. Both evaluations show the approach to outperform a baseline method, which uses tf*idf to select comment-internal terms for use as topic labels. We illustrate how cluster labels can be used to generate cluster summaries and present two alternative sum- mary formats: a pie chart summary and an ab- stractive summary

Beyond opinion classification: Extracting facts, opinions and experiences from health forums.

Introduction: Surveys indicate that patients, particularly those suffering from chronic conditions, strongly benefit from the information found in social networks and online forums. One challenge in accessing online health information is to differentiate between factual and more subjective information. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of exploiting lexical, syntactic, semantic, network-based and emotional properties of texts to automatically classify patient-generated contents into three types: "experiences", "facts" and "opinions", using machine learning algorithms. In this context, our goal is to develop automatic methods that will make online health information more easily accessible and useful for patients, professionals and researchers. Material and Methods: We work with a set of 3000 posts to online health forums in breast cancer, morbus crohn and different allergies. Each sentence in a post is manually labeled as "experience", "fact" or "opinion". Using this data, we train a support vector machine algorithm to perform classification. The results are evaluated in a 10-fold cross validation procedure. Results: Overall, we find that it is possible to predict the type of information contained in a forum post with a very high accuracy (over 80 percent) using simple text representations such as word embeddings and bags of words. We also analyze more complex features such as those based on the network properties, the polarity of words and the verbal tense of the sentences and show that, when combined with the previous ones, they can boost the results

Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access