# Online Conversation Disentanglement with Pointer Networks Source: [Online Conversation Disentanglement with Pointer Networks]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:56:44.875Z Authors: Tao Yu, Shafiq Joty Published: 2020-10-21T15:43:07.000Z ## Abstract Huge amounts of textual conversations occur online every day, where multiple conversations take place concurrently. Interleaved conversations lead to difficulties in not only following the ongoing discussions but also extracting relevant information from simultaneous messages. Conversation disentanglement aims to separate intermingled messages into detached conversations. However, existing disentanglement methods rely mostly on handcrafted features that are dataset specific, which hinders generalization and adaptability. In this work, we propose an end-to-end online framework for conversation disentanglement that avoids time-consuming domain-specific feature engineering. We design a novel way to embed the whole utterance that comprises timestamp, speaker, and message text, and proposes a custom attention mechanism that models disentanglement as a pointing problem while effectively capturing inter-utterance interactions in an end-to-end fashion. We also introduce a joint-learning objective to better capture contextual information. Our experiments on the Ubuntu IRC dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both link and conversation prediction tasks. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Dialogue Disentanglement on Ubuntu IRC (test)](): Dialogue Disentanglement; Ubuntu IRC (test); VI: 94.2. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()