Inferring social nature of conversations from words: Experiments on a corpus of everyday telephone conversations

► We introduce a novel task, that of inferring social relationships from everyday conversations.
► We collected a corpus of natural telephone conversations, unlike any other publicly available corpora.
► We show that 30 words of the beginning of a conversation is sufficient to infer the relationship accurately.
► We show that classifiers are useful in estimating the social engagement using conversations spanning 3 months.

Language is being increasingly harnessed to not only create natural human–machine interfaces but also to infer social behaviors and interactions. In the same vein, we investigate a novel spoken language task, of inferring social relationships in two-party conversations: whether the two parties are related as family, strangers or are involved in business transactions. For our study, we created a corpus of all incoming and outgoing calls from a few homes over the span of a year. On this unique naturalistic corpus of everyday telephone conversations, which is unlike Switchboard or any other public domain corpora, we demonstrate that standard natural language processing techniques can achieve accuracies of about 88%, 82%, 74% and 80% in differentiating business from personal calls, family from non-family calls, familiar from unfamiliar calls and family from other personal calls respectively. Through a series of experiments with our classifiers, we characterize the properties of telephone conversations and find: (a) that 30 words of openings (beginnings) are sufficient to predict business from personal calls, which could potentially be exploited in designing context sensitive interfaces in smart phones; (b) our corpus-based analysis does not support Schegloff and Sack's manual analysis of exemplars in which they conclude that pre-closings differ significantly between business and personal calls – closing fared no better than a random segment; and (c) the distribution of different types of calls are stable over durations as short as 1–2 months. In summary, our results show that social relationships can be inferred automatically in two-party conversations with sufficient accuracy to support practical applications.