Extending the MPC corpus to Chinese and Urdu - A Multiparty Multi-Lingual Chat Corpus for Modeling Social Phenomena in Language

In this paper, we report our efforts in building a multi-lingual multi-party online chatcorpus (MMPC) in order to develop a firm understanding in a set of social constructs such as agenda control, influence, and leadership as well as to computationally model such constructs in online interactions. These automated models will help capture the dialogue dynamics that are essential for developing, among others, realistic human-machine dialogue systems, including autonomous virtual chat agents. In this paper, we first introduce our experiment designand data collection method in Chinese and Urdu, and then report on the current stage of our data collection. We annotated the collected corpus on four levels: communication links, dialogue acts, local topics, and meso-topics. Results from the analyses of annotated data on different languages indicatesome interestingphenomena, which are reported in this paper.