Understanding the dynamics of collaborative multi-party discourse

In this paper, we discuss the efforts underway at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in understanding the dynamics of multi-party discourse across a number of communication modalities, such as email, instant messaging traffic and meeting data. Two prototype systems are discussed. The Conversation Analysis Tool (ChAT) is an experimental test-bed for the development of computational linguistic components and enables users to easily identify topics or persons of interest within multi-party conversations, including who talked to whom, when, the entities that were discussed, etc. The Retrospective Analysis of Communication Events (RACE) prototype, leveraging many of the ChAT components, is an application built specifically for knowledge workers and focuses on merging different types of communication data so that the underlying message can be discovered in an efficient, timely fashion.