We examine a large dialog corpus obtained from the conversation history of a single individual with 104 conversation partners. The corpus consists of half a million instant messages, across several messaging platforms. We focus our analyses on seven speaker attributes, each of which partitions the set of speakers, namely: gender; relative age; family member; romantic partner; classmate; co-worker; and native to the same country. In addition to the content of the messages, we examine conversational aspects such as the time messages are sent, messaging frequency, psycholinguistic word categories, linguistic mirroring, and graph-based features reflecting how people in the corpus mention each other. We present two sets of experiments predicting each attribute using (1) short context windows; and (2) a larger set of messages. We find that using all features leads to gains of 9-14% over using message text only.
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The CANDOR corpus: Insights from a large multimodal dataset of naturalistic conversation
People spend a substantial portion of their lives engaged in conversation, and yet, our scientific understanding of conversation is still in its infancy. Here, we introduce a large, novel, and multimodal corpus of 1656 conversations recorded in spoken English. This 7+ million word, 850-hour corpus totals more than 1 terabyte of audio, video, and transcripts, with moment-to-moment measures of vocal, facial, and semantic expression, together with an extensive survey of speakers’ postconversation reflections. By taking advantage of the considerable scope of the corpus, we explore many examples of how this large-scale public dataset may catalyze future research, particularly across disciplinary boundaries, as scholars from a variety of fields appear increasingly interested in the study of conversation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2120087
- PAR ID:
- 10557357
- Publisher / Repository:
- Science Advances
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Advances
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 13
- ISSN:
- 2375-2548
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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