Learning influences from word use in polylogue
Tomoharu Iwata, Shinji Watanabe · 2011
We propose a probabilistic model for estimating influences among speakers from conversation data with multiple people. In conversations, people tend to mimic their companions ’ be-havior depending on their level of trust. With the proposed model, we assume that the word use of a speaker depends on the word use of previous speakers as well as their own earlier word use and the general word distribution. The influences can be ef-ficiently estimated by using the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. Experiments on two meeting data sets in Japanese and in English demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Index Terms: conversation analysis, influence, latent variable model