Conversational Feedback in Scripted versus Spontaneous Dialogues: A Comparative Analysis

Ildiko Pilan, Laurent Prévot, Hendrik Buschmeier, Pierre Lison


Abstract
Scripted dialogues such as movie and TV subtitles constitute a widespread source of training data for conversational NLP models. However, there are notable linguistic differences between these dialogues and spontaneous interactions, especially regarding the occurrence of communicative feedback such as backchannels, acknowledgments, or clarification requests. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of such feedback phenomena in both subtitles and spontaneous conversations. Based on conversational data spanning eight languages and multiple genres, we extract lexical statistics, classifications from a dialogue act tagger, expert annotations and labels derived from a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM). Our main empirical findings are that (1) communicative feedback is markedly less frequent in subtitles than in spontaneous dialogues and (2) subtitles contain a higher proportion of negative feedback. We also show that dialogues generated by standard LLMs lie much closer to scripted dialogues than spontaneous interactions in terms of communicative feedback.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.38
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
440–457
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.38
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.38
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ildiko Pilan, Laurent Prévot, Hendrik Buschmeier, and Pierre Lison. 2024. Conversational Feedback in Scripted versus Spontaneous Dialogues: A Comparative Analysis. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 440–457, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conversational Feedback in Scripted versus Spontaneous Dialogues: A Comparative Analysis (Pilan et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.38.pdf