I was working today with the team on one of the main problems for Natural Language Processing which is acquiring and maintaining the sense of topic of a conversation.
For most of us we can follow the ebb and flow of a conversation, know immediately when a topic has changed or ask clarifying questions if we think the topic has changed.
Do Instant Messenger conversations work the same way?
I'm not exactly sure they do. In this respect we actually have two different types of conversations.
Standard spoken, 'face to face' conversations and then separately written text conversations (think texting or IMing). In these text based conversations there is often not enough content to extract topic with out having the context available as well.
Add to that the fact that in text conversations the duration of the conversation tends to be shorter and the overall informational content is significantly less than in a standard conversation. When I am talking about informational content here I am really referring to body language, word inflections, tone etc.
So all in all its a difficult challenge to extract the topics of the conversation. It's incredibly useful piece of information to have because it allows the NLP Engine (our Virsona Engine in this case) to really select a much more appropriate response based on knowing that topic.
In case you were wondering the topic of this blog was CRTLA but SSEWBA - source AAAAA: Can't Remember the Three Letter Acronym but Someday Soon Everything will be Acronyms - source American Association Against Ancronym Abuse.
No comments:
Post a Comment