Modeling Topics in User Dialog for Interactive Tablet Media

In this paper, we present a set of crowdsourcing and data processing techniques for annotating, segmenting and analyzing spoken dialog data to track topics of discussion between multiple users. Specifically, our system records the dialog between the parent and child as they interact with a reading game on a tablet, crowdsources the audio data to obtain transcribed text, and models topics of discussion from speech transcription using ConceptNet, a freely available commonsense knowledge base. We present preliminary results evaluating our technique using dialog collected using an interactive reading game for children 3-5 years of age. We successfully demonstrate the ability to form discussion topics by grouping words with similar meaning. The presented approach is entirely domain independent and in future work can be applied to a broad range of interactive entertainment applications, such as mobile devices, tablets and games.