2018/06/08 by Victor Ardulov, Manoj Kumar, Ardulov, Victor +7
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Deception detection and forensic psychology #Discourse Analysis in Language Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1806.03357
openalex publication_date 2018/06/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Child Forensic Interviewing (FI) presents a challenge for effective information retrieval and decision making. The high stakes associated with the process demand that expert legal interviewers are able to effectively establish a channel of communication and elicit substantive knowledge from the child-client while minimizing potential for experiencing trauma. As a first step toward computationally modeling and producing quality spoken interviewing strategies and a generalized understanding of interview dynamics, we propose a novel methodology to computationally model effectiveness criteria, by applying summarization and topic modeling techniques to objectively measure and rank the responsiveness and conversational productivity of a child during FI. We score information retrieval by constructing an agenda to represent general topics of interest and measuring alignment with a given response and leveraging lexical entrainment for responsiveness. For comparison, we present our methods along with traditional metrics of evaluation and discuss the use of prior information for generating situational awareness.