# Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation with Topic-aware Utterance Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05414/) (2017)
- [GALAXY: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-Supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14592/) (2021)
- [doc2dial: A Goal-Oriented Document-Grounded Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06623/) (2020)
- [Multi-View Sequence-to-Sequence Models with Conversational Structure for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01672/) (2020)
- [DialogLM: Pre-trained Model for Long Dialogue Understanding and Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02492/) (2021)
- [UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11256/) (2022)
- [Discovering New Intents via Constrained Deep Adaptive Clustering with Cluster Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08891/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Coherence in Dialogue Systems using Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03371/) (2019)
- [Topic-Aware Multi-turn Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12539/) (2020)
- [SPACE-3: Unified Dialog Model Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06664/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Topic Segmentation of Meetings with BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12978/) (2021)
- [Improving Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation with Utterance-Pair Coherence Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06719/) (2021)
- [Duplex Conversation: Towards Human-like Interaction in Spoken Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15060/) (2022)
- [SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06638/) (2022)
- [Transformer over Pre-trained Transformer for Neural Text Segmentation with Enhanced Topic Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07160/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Summarization for Chat Logs with Topic-Oriented Ranking and Context-Aware Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07300/) (2020)
- [Modeling Topical Relevance for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12735/) (2020)
- [A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10759/) (2022)
- [Dialogue Session Segmentation by Embedding-Enhanced TextTiling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.03955/) (2016)
- [CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11617/) (2022)
- [Empathetic Response Generation via Emotion Cause Transition Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11787/) (2023)
- [Structured Summarization: Unified Text Segmentation and Segment Labeling as a Generation Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13759/) (2022)
- [Learning to Rank Question-Answer Pairs using Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder with Latent Topic Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03430/) (2017)
- [Dial2vec: Self-Guided Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Dialogue Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15332/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Uncovering the Potential of ChatGPT for Discourse Analysis in Dialogue: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08391/) (2023)
- [UniSA: Unified Generative Framework for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01339/) (2023)
- [The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14195/) (2024)
- [SuperDialseg: A Large-scale Dataset for Supervised Dialogue Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08371/) (2023)
- [Self-Explanation Prompting Improves Dialogue Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12940/) (2023)
- [MP2D: An Automated Topic Shift Dialogue Generation Framework Leveraging Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05814/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Mutual Learning of Discourse Parsing and Topic Segmentation in Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19799/) (2024)
- [A Novel LLM-based Two-stage Summarization Approach for Long Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06520/) (2024)
- [CATCH: A Controllable Theme Detection Framework with Contextualized Clustering and Hierarchical Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21715/) (2025)
- [Codebook-Injected Dialogue Segmentation for Multi-Utterance Constructs Annotation: LLM-Assisted and Gold-Label-Free Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12061/) (2026)
- [CobSeg: Coherence Boundary Modeling for Dialogue Topic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30668/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialogue Topic Segmentation (DTS) plays an essential role in a variety of dialogue modeling tasks. Previous DTS methods either focus on semantic similarity or dialogue coherence to assess topic similarity for unsupervised dialogue segmentation. However, the topic similarity cannot be fully identified via semantic similarity or dialogue coherence. In addition, the unlabeled dialogue data, which contains useful clues of utterance relationships, remains underexploited. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised DTS framework, which learns topic-aware utterance representations from unlabeled dialogue data through neighboring utterance matching and pseudo-segmentation. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., DialSeg711 and Doc2Dial) demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the strong baseline methods. For reproducibility, we provide our code and data at:https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/dial-start.