Adjacency pair recognition, a necessary component of discussion thread reconstruction, is the task of recognizing reply-to relations between pairs of discussion turns. Previously, dialogue act classification and metadata-based features have been shown useful in adjacency pair recognition. However, for certain forums such as Wikipedia discussions, metadata is not available, and existing dialogue...

Online discussion forums have become a popular medium for users to discuss with and seek information from other users having similar interests. A typical discussion thread consists of a sequence of posts posted by multiple users. All the posts in a thread are not equally useful and serve a different purpose providing different types of information (some posts contain questions, some answers, et...

The paper describes a new conversation management approach which may apply to a class of mixed initiative information seeking applications. It employs an application-independent conversation model inspired by the conversation theory of Grosz and Sidner [1]. Based on the model, we design a multi-layer conversation manager which employs instance-based learning (IBL) to determine conversation plan...