Conversation analysis at work: detection of conflict in competitive discussions through semi-automaticturn-organization analysis

This paper proposes a semi-automatic approach aimed at detecting conflict in conversations. The approach is based on statistical techniques capable of identifying turn-organization regularities associated with conflict. The only manual step of the process is the segmentation of the conversations into turns(time intervals during which only one person talks) and overlapping speech segments (time intervals during which several persons talk at the same time). The rest of the process takes place automatically and the results show that conflictualexchanges can be detected with Precision and Recall around 70% (the experiments have been performed over six hours of political debates). The approach brings two main benefits: the first is the possibility of analyzing potentially large amounts ofconversational data with a limited effort, the second is that the model parameters provide indications on what turn-regularities are most likely to account for the presence of conflict.