Management of a focused information sharing dialogue based on discourse trees

A system comprising:

• a non-transitory computer-readable medium storing computer-executable program instructions;
• and
• a processing device communicatively coupled to the non-transitory computer-readable medium for executing the computer-executable program instructions, wherein executing the computer-executable program instructions configures the processing device to perform operations comprising:
• creating a discourse tree from text comprising fragments, wherein the discourse tree comprises a root node, nonterminal nodes, and terminal nodes, each nonterminal node representing a rhetorical relationship between two of the fragments, and each terminal node is associated with one of the fragments, wherein the fragments are elementary discourse units;
• determining, from the discourse tree, a subset of terminal nodes that are (i) associated with a nonterminal node representing a rhetorical relationship of type elaboration and (ii) associated with a nucleus elementary discourse unit of the elaboration;
• calculating, for each node of the subset of terminal nodes, a respective path length from the root node;
• identifying, from the subset of terminal nodes, a topic node having a path length that is a smallest path length of the path lengths;
• determining, from the topic node, a topic of the discourse tree by extracting a noun phrase from the nucleus elementary discourse unit associated with the topic node;
• and
• providing the topic to a user device.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing computer-executable program instructions that when executed by a processor, perform operations comprising:

• creating a discourse tree from text comprising fragments, wherein the discourse tree comprises a root node, nonterminal nodes, and terminal nodes, each nonterminal node representing a rhetorical relationship between two of the fragments, and each terminal node is associated with one of the fragments, wherein the fragments are elementary discourse units;
• determining, from the discourse tree, a subset of terminal nodes that are (i) associated with a nonterminal node representing a rhetorical relationship of type elaboration and (ii) associated with a nucleus elementary discourse unit of the elaboration;
• calculating, for each node of the subset of terminal nodes, a respective path length from the root node;
• identifying, from the subset of terminal nodes, a topic node having a path length that is a smallest path length of the path lengths;
• determining, from the topic node, a topic of the discourse tree by extracting a noun phrase from the nucleus elementary discourse unit associated with the topic node;
• and
• providing the topic to a user device.