Conversational Knowledge Process for Social Intelligence Design

The Internet and ubiquitous network technologies have succeeded in connecting people and knowledge over space and time. The next step is to realize knowledgeable communities on the ubiquitous network. Social Intelligence Design is a field of research on harmonizing people and artifacts by focusing on social intelligence, defined as the ability of actors and agents to learn and to solve problems as a function of social structure and to manage their relationships with each other. In this paper, I 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 conversational system by basing it on a large amount of conversational quanta collected from the real world. I survey major results concerning acquisition, annotation, adaptation, and understanding of conversation quanta.