However, it is interesting to consider whether we really need to consider relationships specifically between speech segments themselves, or whether it suffices to simply consider relationships between the speakers of the speech segments.
as an alternative to using same-speaker links, we tried a speaker-based approach wherein the way we determine the initial individual-document classification score for each speech segment uttered by a person p in a given debate is to run an SVM on the concatenation of all of p's speech segments within that debate.