Related papers: CODY: A graph-based framework for the analysis of …
Dialogue is at the core of human behaviour and being able to identify the topic at hand is crucial to take part in conversation. Yet, there are few accounts of the topical organisation in casual dialogue and of how people recognise the…
This article presents a novel approach for learning low-dimensional distributed representations of users in online social networks. Existing methods rely on the network structure formed by the social relationships among users to extract…
Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems have become crucial components in interactive artificial intelligence applications. While recent advances have capitalized on pre-trained language models (PLMs), they exhibit limitations regarding…
Group interactions take place within a particular socio-temporal context, which should be taken into account when modelling interactions in online communities. We propose a method for jointly modelling community structure and language over…
Online social post streams such as Twitter timelines and forum discussions have emerged as important channels for information dissemination. They are noisy, informal, and surge quickly. Real life events, which may happen and evolve every…
The quality of a conversation goes beyond the individual quality of each reply, and instead emerges from how these combine into interactional dynamics that give the conversation its distinctive overall "shape". However, there is no robust…
Detecting abusive language in social media conversations poses significant challenges, as identifying abusiveness often depends on the conversational context, characterized by the content and topology of preceding comments. Traditional…
Many professional services are provided through text and voice systems, from voice calls over the internet to messaging and emails. There is a growing need for both individuals and organizations to understand these online conversations…
Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life, from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal conclaves. While costly in terms of time and organization effort, group discussions are…
This is the first work investigating community structure and interaction dynamics through the lens of quotes in online discussion forums. We examine four forums of different size, language, and topic. Quote usage, which is surprisingly…
Exploratory search is an open-ended information retrieval process that aims at discovering knowledge about a topic or domain rather than searching for a specific answer or piece of information. Conversational interfaces are particularly…
We present a structured random-walk model that captures key aspects of how people communicate in groups. Our model takes the form of a correlated L\'{e}vy flight that quantifies the balance between focused discussion of an idea and…
In order to build dialogue systems to tackle the ambitious task of holding social conversations, we argue that we need a data driven approach that includes insight into human conversational chit chat, and which incorporates different…
Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational…
The popularity of image sharing on social media and the engagement it creates between users reflects the important role that visual context plays in everyday conversations. We present a novel task, Image-Grounded Conversations (IGC), in…
The recent availability of data describing social networks is changing our understanding of the "microscopic structure" of a social tie. A social tie indeed is an aggregated outcome of many social interactions such as face-to-face…
How does information flow in online social networks? How does the structure and size of the information cascade evolve in time? How can we efficiently mine the information contained in cascade dynamics? We approach these questions…
Topics play an important role in the global organisation of a conversation as what is currently discussed constrains the possible contributions of the participant. Understanding the way topics are organised in interaction would provide…
We introduce a video framework for modeling the association between verbal and non-verbal communication during dyadic conversation. Given the input speech of a speaker, our approach retrieves a video of a listener, who has facial…
The proliferation of online debate platforms and social media has led to an unprecedented volume of argumentative content on controversial topics from multiple perspectives. While this wealth of perspectives offers opportunities for…