Mechanisms are provided for implementing a conversation monitoring system. The conversation monitoring system monitors a conversation between at least two participants and extracting, by the conversation monitoring system, key terms present in communications between the at least two participants. The conversation monitoring system generates a provenance graph data structure based on the extraction of the key terms where the provenance graph data structure has speaker nodes representing the at least two participants, term nodes representing the key terms present in the communications, and edges connecting nodes in the provenance graph. The conversation monitoring system analyzes the provenance graph data structure to identify a relative ranking of the key terms within the conversation and generates an output representing content of the conversation based on the relative ranking of the key terms.