Abstract:Short text message streams are produced by Short Message Service, Instant Messager and BBS, which are widely used. Each stream usually contains. Extracting the conversations in the streams is helpful to various applications including business intelligence, investigation of crime and public opinion analysis. Existing research mainly based on text similarity encounter challenges such as the anomaly, dynamics, and the sparse eigenvector of short text message. This paper proposes an innovative conversation extraction method to cover the challenges. Firstly, the study detects the conversation boundary of short text message streams using temporal feature; secondly, contextually correlative degree is introduced to replace similar degree, and an instance-based machine learning method is proposed to compute the correlative degree. Finally, the study designs Single-Pass based conversation extraction algorithm SPFC (single-pass based on frequency and correlation), which combines the temporal and contextually correlative characteristics. Experimental results on a large real Chinese dataset show that this method SPFC improves the performance by 30% when compared with the best existing variation algorithm in terms of F1 measure.