Conversation Clusters: Grouping Conversation Topics through Human-Computer Dialogs (CHI-2009 Round 2)

Conversation Clusters: Grouping Conversation Topics through Human-Computer Dialogs (CHI-2009 Round 2)

By: Tony Bergstrom, Karrie Kerahalios

Summary:
There are many different ways that information can be logged for future referencing. One of the most common things that is archived is conversations. Searching through them is often a very difficult task which requires reading the entire record to find what is needed. This paper tries to solve this problem by using the strengths of machines and man together. Computers have the ability to store large bits of information and people have the ability by augmenting our judgment based on the context of the message being received. This paper presents two different ways to store information. A topic view and a historical view. The topic view serves to see the topics discussed over the course of the meeting while the historical view allows the user to see the progression of topics as time passes. Conversation clusters is something that emerged from this research. It is an attempt to bridge communication between the verbal languages of humans and machines. These conversation clusters use a dynamic visualization on a shared public tabletop to allow the users to see the most recent discussions and the topics associated to them. They do this by showing topics of conversation as a thread history. Threads can merge, split and they can even die when a topic is no longer discussed. The researchers took out topic words from conversations by having each person in the conversation wear a microphone and recording them. Their research showed that conversation clusters were successful in correctly showing what the conversation was about and allowing for faster and easier to find lookups.

Discussion:
This paper seemed kinda cool, but kinda not. I can see the importance of it, but it is not something that I would be interested in at all. The paper seemed rather draggy and not very well written. It made it rather dull to read. The concept of conversation clusters however was very interesting and I think that it is a good design for archiving things in the future.