Systems and methods are disclosed herein for training a model to accurately determine whether two phrases are conversationally connected. A media guidance application may detect a first phrase and a second phrase, translate each phrase to a string of word types, append each string to the back of a prior string to create a combined string, determine a degree to which any of the individual strings matches any singleton template, and determine a degree to which the combined string matches any conversational template. Based on the degrees to which the individual and combination strings match the singleton and conversational templates, respectively, strengths of association are correspondingly updated.