Discourse segmentation of multi-party conversation.pdf

Discourse Segmentation of Multi-Party Conversation Michel Galley Kathleen McKeown Columbia University Computer Science Department 1214 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027, USA {galley,kathy}@ Eric Fosler-Lussier Columbia University Electrical Engineering Department 500 West 120th Street New York, NY 10027, USA fosler@ Hongyan Jing IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA hjing@ Abstract We present a domain-independent topic segmentation algorithm for multi-party speech. Our feature-based algorithm com- bines knowledge about content using a text-based algorithm as a feature and about form using linguistic and acous- tic cues about topic shifts extracted from speech. This segmentation algorithm uses automatically induced decision rules to combine the different features. The em- bedded text-based algorithm builds on lex- ical cohesion and has performance compa- rable to state-of-the-art algorithms based on lexical information. A significant er- ror reduction is obtained by combining the two knowledge sources. 1 Introduction Topic segmentation aims to automatically divide text documents, audio recordings, or video segments, into topically related units. While extensive research has targeted the problem of topic segmentation of written texts and spoken monologues, few have stud- ied the problem of segmenting conversations with many participants (e.g., meetings). In this paper, we present an algorithm for segmenting meeting tran- scripts. This study uses recorded meetings of typi- cally six to eight participants, in which the informal style includes ungrammatical sentences and overlap- ping speakers. These meetings generally do not have pre-set agendas, and the topics discussed in the same meeting may or may not related. The meeting segmenter comprises two compo- nents: one that capitalizes on word distribution to identify homogeneous units that are topically cohe- sive, and a second component that analyzes conver- sational features of meeting trans