Extending Word Highlighting in Multiparticipant Chat

We describe initial work on extensions to word highlighting for multiparticipant chat to aid users in finding messages of interest, especially during times of high traffic in chat rooms. We have annotated a corpus of chat messages from a technical chat domain (Ubuntu’s technical support), indicating whether they are related to Ubuntu’s new desktop environment Unity. We also created an unsupervised learning algorithm, in which relations are represented with a graph, and applied this to find words related to Unity so they can be highlighted in new, unseen chat messages. On the task of finding relevant messages, our approach outperformed two baseline approaches that are similar to current state-of-the-art word highlighting methods in chat clients.