Investigating automatic measurements of prosodic accommodation and its dynamics in social interaction

Abstract

Spoken dialogue systems are increasingly being used to facilitate and enhance human communication. While these interactive systems can process the linguistic aspects of human communication, they are not yet capable of processing the complex dynamics involved in social interaction, such as the adaptation on the part of interlocutors. Providing interactive systems with the capacity to process and exhibit this accommodation could however improve their efficiency and make machines more socially-competent interactants.At present, no automatic system is available to process prosodic accommodation, nor do any clear measures exist that quantify its dynamic manifestation. While it can be observed to be a monotonically manifest property, it is our hypotheses that it evolves dynamically with functional social aspects.In this paper, we propose an automatic system for its measurement and the capture of its dynamic manifestation. We investigate the evolution of prosodic accommodation in 41 Japanese dyadic telephone conversations and discuss its manifestation in relation to its functions in social interaction. Overall, our study shows that prosodic accommodation changes dynamically over the course of a conversation and across conversations, and that these dynamics inform about the naturalness of the conversation flow, the speakers' degree of involvement and their affinity in the conversation.

Dyadic Behavior Analysis in Depression Severity Assessment Interviews

“…These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that a function of depression is to attenuate interpersonal coordination in the service of social isolation [27]. Further, prosodic accommodation has been found to be perceptually correlated with increased perceived flow of conversation, speaker engagement, and liking [14]. …”

“…This approach overcomes the issue of asynchronously observed speech in dyadic interactions and enables the investigation of accommodation between the interactants [14]. With respect to the accommodation between interactants, we identified a main effect of depression severity on PS and QOQ (cf.…”

“…Within this study, we investigate correlation between participants’ and interviewers’ speech characteristics using a time-aligned moving average approach [14]. Interviews were subdivided into successive segments of 50 seconds with 10 second shifts (i.e.…”

Prosodic accommodation and salience: The nuclear contours of Andalusian Spanish speakers in Asturias

“…Romera and Elordieta's (2013) account of Peninsular Spanish speakers relocated in the Catalan-speaking island of Majorca constitutes the only work on convergent accommodation by relocated speakers in a Spanish setting. Convergent accommodation has also been attested for momentary situations as short-term accommodation, such as customertravel agent conversation (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), telephone conversations (De Looze, Scherer, Vaughan, & Campbell, 2014), experimental tasks (Pardo, 2006(Pardo, , 2013, experimental interactions (MacLeod, 2012), or exposure to formal contexts (Hernández-Campoy, 2010).…”

Investigating the effectiveness of communication taking place between hospital pharmacists and patients during medication counselling

“…These preconceived perceptions set the tone and direct the way in which they engage in the conversation. CAT has been applied to various research conducted in social science, [216][217][218][219][220] business, 221-223 law 224 225,226 as well as to study communication that takes place between healthcare providers and patients 175,[227][228][229][230][231][232][233][234][235][236][237] and between healthcare professional groups. 175,209,237 CAT proposes that speakers in an exchange make adjustments (consciously and unconsciously) to the way they communicate with each other based on each speaker's individual goals for that communication interaction as well as their desire to develop and maintain their personal, social or professional identity.…”