A unifying framework for modeling acoustic/prosodic entrainment: definition and evaluation on two large corpora

Ramiro H. Gálvez, Lara Gauder, Jordi Luque, Agustín Gravano


Abstract
Acoustic/prosodic (a/p) entrainment has been associated with multiple positive social aspects of human-human conversations. However, research on its effects is still preliminary, first because how to model it is far from standardized, and second because most of the reported findings rely on small corpora or on corpora collected in experimental setups. The present article has a twofold purpose: 1) it proposes a unifying statistical framework for modeling a/p entrainment, and 2) it tests on two large corpora of spontaneous telephone interactions whether three metrics derived from this framework predict positive social aspects of the conversations. The corpora differ in their spoken language, domain, and positive social outcome attached. To our knowledge, this is the first article studying relations between a/p entrainment and positive social outcomes in such large corpora of spontaneous dialog. Our results suggest that our metrics effectively predict, up to some extent, positive social aspects of conversations, which not only validates the methodology, but also provides further insights into the elusive topic of entrainment in human-human conversation.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
215–224
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.27
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.27
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ramiro H. Gálvez, Lara Gauder, Jordi Luque, and Agustín Gravano. 2020. A unifying framework for modeling acoustic/prosodic entrainment: definition and evaluation on two large corpora. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 215–224, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A unifying framework for modeling acoustic/prosodic entrainment: definition and evaluation on two large corpora (Gálvez et al., SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.27.pdf
Video:
 https://youtube.com/watch?v=cyZY4WyARkI