What do We Know about Conversation Participants: Experiments on Conversation Entailment

Given the increasing amount of conversation data, techniques to automatically acquire information about conversation participants have become more important. Towards this goal, we investigate the problem of conversation entailment, a task that determines whether a given conversation discourse entails a hypothesis about the participants. This paper describes the challenges related to conversation entailment based on our collected data and presents a probabilistic framework that incorporates conversation context in entailment prediction. Our preliminary experimental results have shown that conversation context, in particular dialogue act, plays an important role in conversation entailment.