English

A Hybrid Framework for Topic Structure using Laughter Occurrences

Machine Learning 2020-01-06 v1 Computation and Language Sound Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

Conversational discourse coherence depends on both linguistic and paralinguistic phenomena. In this work we combine both paralinguistic and linguistic knowledge into a hybrid framework through a multi-level hierarchy. Thus it outputs the discourse-level topic structures. The laughter occurrences are used as paralinguistic information from the multiparty meeting transcripts of ICSI database. A clustering-based algorithm is proposed that chose the best topic-segment cluster from two independent, optimized clusters, namely, hierarchical agglomerative clustering and KK-medoids. Then it is iteratively hybridized with an existing lexical cohesion based Bayesian topic segmentation framework. The hybrid approach improves the performance of both of the stand-alone approaches. This leads to the brief study of interactions between topic structures with discourse relational structure. This training-free topic structuring approach can be applicable to online understanding of spoken dialogs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.00573,
  title  = {A Hybrid Framework for Topic Structure using Laughter Occurrences},
  author = {Sucheta Ghosh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.00573},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:01:41.055Z