SIGdial 2016

17th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

The SENSEI Annotated Corpus: Human Summaries of Reader Comment Conversations in On-line News

Emma Barker, Monica Lestari Paramita, Ahmet Aker, Emina Kurtic, Mark Hepple and Robert Gaizauskas
Researchers are beginning to explore how to generate summaries of extended argumentative conversations in social media, such as those found in reader comments in on-line news. To date, however, there has been little discussion of what these summaries should be like and a lack of human-authored exemplars, quite likely because writing summaries of this kind of interchange is so difficult. In this paper we propose one type of reader comment summary – the conversation overview summary – that aims to capture the key argumentative content of a reader comment conversation. We describe a method we have developed to support humans in authoring conversation overview summaries and present a publicly available corpus – the first of its kind – of news articles plus comment sets, each multiply annotated, according to our method, with conversation overview summaries.