Conversation Quantization for Informal Information Circulation in a Community

In this paper, we present a computational approach to understanding and augmenting the conversational knowledge process that is a collective activity for knowledge creation, management, and application, where conversational communications are used as a primary means of interaction among participating agents. The key idea is conversation quantization, a technique of approximating a continuous flow of conversation by a series of conversation quanta that represent points of the discourse. Conversation quantization enables to implement a rather robust conversation system by basing it on a large amount of conversation quanta collected from the real world. We make clear the nature of conversation quanta by extracting them from practical situations by hand. Based on the preliminary experiments, we present a method for automatic extraction of the first approximation of conversation quanta. To support the conversational knowledge process, we have developed the Sustainable Knowledge Globe (SKG) that can manage conversation quanta by switching an overlooking sphere view and a conversational agent in an immersive view. We discuss effectiveness of SKG based on an experiment.