MPC: A Multi-Party Chat Corpus for Modeling Social Phenomena in Discourse
Samira Shaikh, Tomek Strzalkowski, Aaron Broadwell, Jennifer Stromer‐Galley, Sarah Taylor, Nick Webb · 2010
In this paper, we describe our experience with collecting and creating an annotated corpus of multi-party online conversations in a chat-room environment.This effort is part of a larger project to develop computational models of social phenomena such as agenda control, influence, and leadership in on-line interactions.Such models will help capturing the dialogue dynamics that are essential for developing, among others, realistic human-machine dialogue systems, including autonomous virtual chat agents.In this paper we describe data collection method used and the characteristics of the initial dataset of English chat.We have devised a multi-tiered collection process in which the subjects start from simple, free-flowing conversations and progress towards more complex and structured interactions.In this paper, we report on the first two stages of this process, which were recently completed.The third, large-scale collection effort is currently being conducted.All English dialogue has been annotated at four levels: communication links, dialogue acts, local topics and meso-topics.