Exploring Digital Conversation Corpora with Process Mining

Understanding how sentences constitute conversations is still a matter of disagreement. The automatic analysis of corpora can bring new perspectives on this issue. We show that process mining, a computer science approach for analysing human behaviour, enables the inductive identification of within-turn regularities in digital conversations. We use speech acts as a way to discretise conversations and enable the analysis. To this end, we develop a fine-grained, corpus-independent classification of speech acts that we describe and validate. We perform a manual sentence-by-sentence multi-label contextual annotation of a corpus of digital conversations and we explore it with process mining. Our results suggest that speech act theory could be extended to include typicality conditions for sequences of utterances.