An NLP-oriented analysis of the instant messaging discourse

Abstract

This paper describes the results of the analysis of an experimentally collected small corpus of messages exchanged through an instant messaging (IM) programme. The data is analysed from the point of view of automatic parsing. Special attention is paid to two problems associated with IM discourse: the semantic multi-tasking (or the interweaving of topics) of conversation partners, and the non-standard spelling found in such dialogues. The contents of the corpus are also compared with other types of written dialogues, i.e. SMS messages and conversations between human users and chatterbots. Finally, some solutions are proposed to facilitate the process of automatic parsing of IM messages. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.