Introduction to ConvoKit
ConvoKit is a comprehensive toolkit designed to analyze conversations and extract conversational features. Drawing inspiration from the well-regarded machine learning library, scikit-learn, ConvoKit provides a seamless single unified interface for its users. This tool is not only intuitive but also highly compatible, allowing researchers and developers to explore social phenomena in conversations effectively. Maintaining a strong community presence, the project continuously evolves, with the latest version released in July 2023.
Key Features
Linguistic Coordination
This feature measures linguistic influence and the balance of power dynamics between communicators using function words. For example, it can be used to explore power dynamics in U.S. Supreme Court discussions.
Politeness Strategies
Utilizing lexical and parse-based features, ConvoKit can analyze politeness and impoliteness in dialogue. For instance, it can be employed to study the use of politeness strategies in problematic Wikipedia discussions.
Expected Conversational Context Framework
This framework characterizes communication by considering the expected conversational context. It includes models and pipelines that analyze various dialogue forms, such as British parliamentary question periods and Wikipedia discussions.
Hypergraph Conversation Representation
By representing conversations using hypergraphs, this feature extracts structural aspects of dialogues. It is exemplified through various applications on Reddit interactions.
Linguistic Diversity in Conversations
ConvoKit provides a method for evaluating linguistic diversity within individual conversations and across larger populations, such as forums like ChangeMyView.
CRAFT: Online Forecasting of Conversational Outcomes
This neural model project forecasts how conversations might unfold, such as predicting whether a dialogue might deride into personal attacks. It's available as a notebook tool for interactive use and experimentation.
Extensive Datasets
ConvoKit is equipped with several datasets, streamlining research and analysis across multiple domains:
- Conversations Gone Awry Datasets: Encourage behavior analysis in Wikipedia and ChangeMyView threads where discussions go off track.
- Cornell Movie-Dialogs Corpus: Fictional conversation data from movie scripts for enriching natural language understanding.
- Parliament Question Time Corpus: Captures historical parliamentary question-and-answer periods.
- Supreme Court Corpus: Analyzes oral arguments from U.S. Supreme Court sessions.
- Wikipedia Talk Pages and WikiConv Corpuses: Provide rich data collected from Wikipedia's editing discussions, alongside reconstructed talk page conversations.
- Reddit Corpus: Offers data from over 900,000 subreddits, along with a more manageable subset of 100 active ones.
- Other specialized datasets: These include diverse arenas like Intelligence Squared Debates, tennis interviews, and even 'Yes, and' improvisation exchanges from a podcast.
Users can also implement personal datasets using ConvoKit's structured convokit.Corpus object model.
Getting Started
To harness the power of ConvoKit, users need Python version 3.8 or higher. Installation involves using simple command line tools to download required models (Spacy's and NLTK's language models) and the package itself. For detailed installation guidance, the project offers helpful documentation and troubleshooting tips to resolve any challenges encountered during setup.
Community and Contributions
ConvoKit thrives on community involvement and welcomes contributions. Contributors are encouraged to follow the project's guidelines to improve and extend ConvoKit further. For new users, a series of tutorials and documentation provide in-depth insights into ConvoKit's capabilities and applications.
Academic Acknowledgement
If ConvoKit's resources, whether the codebase or datasets, contribute to scholarly work, proper citations to the authors and their associated work are duly recommended. This recognition not only highlights ConvoKit's influence but also propels further academic and practical advancements in conversational analysis.
In conclusion, ConvoKit stands as an indispensable tool for both academic researchers and industry professionals aiming to decode and interpret the intricate nuances of human communication, making a substantial impact in areas like social media analysis, legal discourse, and more.