Topic segmentation approaches range from simple heuristic methods based on lexical similarity (Morris and Hirst, 1991;Hearst, 1997) to more intricate generative models and supervised methods (Georgescul et al., 2006;Purver et al., 2006;Gruber et al., 2007;Eisenstein and Barzilay, 2008), which have been shown to outperform the established heuristics.
previous computational work on conversational structure, particularly in topic discovery and topic segmentation, focuses primarily on content, ignoring the speakers.