Aspects of Dynamics in Dialogue Collaboration

Abstract

Collaborative dialogue is an important category of human interaction and is widely studied in the literature, especially in fields that attempt to develop new technologies that enable wider varieties of collaborative dialogues. The ingredients of collaboration in dialogue are less thoroughly addressed. We describe the theoretical framework within which we are working and our approach to the construction of a theory of what may make dialogue collaborative. We study a multimodal dialogue corpus (MULTISIMO) testing for positive and negative correlations between dialogue content features and interaction features that one might reasonably imagine are related to assessments of degrees of collaboration. The duration before the second speaker’s first turn and degree of imbalance in the number of words produced by speakers negatively correlate with collaboration assessments (that is, imbalances of content and a delay in the first speaker yielding the floor lead to diminished perceptions of collaboration), while a monotonically increasing duration of focus in successive dialogue sections (rather than overall dialogue duration) correlates positively (that is, when participants are deemed to be extending the duration of the task rather than increasing speed with experience, this is perceived as collaborative).