A User’s Guide for Conversation Research

Abstract: People are talking to one another, all the time, all over the world. And organizations are filled with important conversations, including meetings, interviews, negotiations, mentoring, feedback, and so on. There has been increasing interest in conversations as a rich and natural source of data from social interactions. Communication technology and natural language processing tools have improved the capacity for, respectively, recording and analyzing conversations. But these new datasets and analyses are only beginning to influence management research. Our workshop outlines common questions and reviews examples from the workflows of several recent papers that made use of data from several kinds of conversations. This will involve reviews of various paradigms, protocols, and tools, including a live demonstration of conversation analysis using tools in the R software environment. We hope to provide a forum for attendees and other researchers to discuss their own approaches to studying conversation, as well as our own thoughts on best practices and lessons learned. Our goal is to share our collective knowledge more broadly, and to encourage a broader community of inquiry around conversational behavior.

Keywords: natural language processing, conversation