{"ID":2869055,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16464","arxiv_id":"2509.16464","title":"Computational Analysis of Conversation Dynamics through Participant Responsivity","abstract":"Growing literature explores toxicity and polarization in discourse, with comparatively less work on characterizing what makes dialogue prosocial and constructive. We explore conversational discourse and investigate a method for characterizing its quality built upon the notion of ``responsivity'' -- whether one person's conversational turn is responding to a preceding turn. We develop and evaluate methods for quantifying responsivity -- first through semantic similarity of speaker turns, and second by leveraging state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to identify the relation between two speaker turns. We evaluate both methods against a ground truth set of human-annotated conversations. Furthermore, selecting the better performing LLM-based approach, we characterize the nature of the response -- whether it responded to that preceding turn in a substantive way or not. We view these responsivity links as a fundamental aspect of dialogue but note that conversations can exhibit significantly different responsivity structures. Accordingly, we then develop conversation-level derived metrics to address various aspects of conversational discourse. We use these derived metrics to explore other conversations and show that they support meaningful characterizations and differentiations across a diverse collection of conversations.","short_abstract":"Growing literature explores toxicity and polarization in discourse, with comparatively less work on characterizing what makes dialogue prosocial and constructive. We explore conversational discourse and investigate a method for characterizing its quality built upon the notion of ``responsivity'' -- whether one person's...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16464","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16464v1","authors":"[\"Margaret Hughes\",\"Brandon Roy\",\"Elinor Poole-Dayan\",\"Deb Roy\",\"Jad Kabbara\"]","published":"2025-09-19T23:13:13Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.CY\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}