Chunks In Multiparty Conversation-Building Blocks For Extended Social Talk

Building applications which can form a longer term social bond with a user or engage with a group of users calls for knowledge of how longer conversations work. This paper describes preliminary explorations of the structure of long (c. one hour) multiparty casual conversations, focusing on a binary distinction between two types of interaction phases-chat and chunk. A collection of long form conversations which provide the data for our explorations is described. The main result is that chat and chunk segments show differences in the distribution of their duration.