Conversation Kernels: A Flexible Mechanism to Learn Relevant Context for Online Conversation Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Agarwal, Vibhor, Gupta, Arjoo, De, Suparna, Sastry, Nishanth
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Agarwal, Vibhor
Gupta, Arjoo
De, Suparna
Sastry, Nishanth
author_facet Agarwal, Vibhor
Gupta, Arjoo
De, Suparna
Sastry, Nishanth
contents Understanding online conversations has attracted research attention with the growth of social networks and online discussion forums. Content analysis of posts and replies in online conversations is difficult because each individual utterance is usually short and may implicitly refer to other posts within the same conversation. Thus, understanding individual posts requires capturing the conversational context and dependencies between different parts of a conversation tree and then encoding the context dependencies between posts and comments/replies into the language model. To this end, we propose a general-purpose mechanism to discover appropriate conversational context for various aspects about an online post in a conversation, such as whether it is informative, insightful, interesting or funny. Specifically, we design two families of Conversation Kernels, which explore different parts of the neighborhood of a post in the tree representing the conversation and through this, build relevant conversational context that is appropriate for each task being considered. We apply our developed method to conversations crawled from slashdot.org, which allows users to apply highly different labels to posts, such as 'insightful', 'funny', etc., and therefore provides an ideal experimental platform to study whether a framework such as Conversation Kernels is general-purpose and flexible enough to be adapted to disparately different conversation understanding tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20482
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conversation Kernels: A Flexible Mechanism to Learn Relevant Context for Online Conversation Understanding
Agarwal, Vibhor
Gupta, Arjoo
De, Suparna
Sastry, Nishanth
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding online conversations has attracted research attention with the growth of social networks and online discussion forums. Content analysis of posts and replies in online conversations is difficult because each individual utterance is usually short and may implicitly refer to other posts within the same conversation. Thus, understanding individual posts requires capturing the conversational context and dependencies between different parts of a conversation tree and then encoding the context dependencies between posts and comments/replies into the language model. To this end, we propose a general-purpose mechanism to discover appropriate conversational context for various aspects about an online post in a conversation, such as whether it is informative, insightful, interesting or funny. Specifically, we design two families of Conversation Kernels, which explore different parts of the neighborhood of a post in the tree representing the conversation and through this, build relevant conversational context that is appropriate for each task being considered. We apply our developed method to conversations crawled from slashdot.org, which allows users to apply highly different labels to posts, such as 'insightful', 'funny', etc., and therefore provides an ideal experimental platform to study whether a framework such as Conversation Kernels is general-purpose and flexible enough to be adapted to disparately different conversation understanding tasks.
title Conversation Kernels: A Flexible Mechanism to Learn Relevant Context for Online Conversation Understanding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20482