Naturalness and rapport in a pitch adaptive learning companion

Lubold, Nichola; Pon-Barry, Heather; Walker, Erin

doi:10.1109/asru.2015.7404781

Cited by 26 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Linguistic entrainment 1 , the phenomena whereby dialogue partners speak more similarly to each other [1,2], is an important characteristic of human conversation. Entrainment is important for the naturalness of speech [3] and associated with a variety of conversational qualities, like dialogue and task success [4,5,6,7]. According to the psycholinguistics literature, entrainment is believed to occur at multiple linguistic levels, such as acoustic-prosodic, lexical, and syntactic [8,4,9,10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Entrainment in Multi-Party Spoken Dialogues at Multiple Linguistic Levels

Rahimi¹,

Kumar²,

Litman³

et al. 2017

Interspeech 2017

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Linguistic entrainment, the phenomena whereby dialogue partners speak more similarly to each other in a variety of dimensions, is key to the success and naturalness of interactions. While there is considerable evidence for both lexical and acoustic-prosodic entrainment, little work has been conducted to investigate the relationship between these two different modalities using the same measures in the same dialogues, specifically in multi-party dialogue. In this paper, we measure lexical and acoustic-prosodic entrainment for multi-party teams to explore whether entrainment occurs at multiple levels during conversation and to understand the relationship between these two modalities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies have focused on measuring entrainment in various modalities and implementing entrainment in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) [11,3,12,13]. In fact, implementing an entraining SDS is important to improving these systems' performance and quality, as measured by user perceptions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Entrainment in Multi-Party Spoken Dialogues at Multiple Linguistic Levels

Rahimi¹,

Kumar²,

Litman³

et al. 2017

Interspeech 2017

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“…Some recent work has explored increasing prosodic synchrony in a speech-controlled child-robot game in order to promote cooperation and improve enjoyment (Chaspari and Lehman, 2016;Sadoughi et al, 2017). In addition, Lubold and colleagues developed several social voice-adaptive robots that adjust the pitch of the robot's text-to-speech voice to match that of its human interlocutor (Lubold et al, 2015(Lubold et al, , 2016(Lubold et al, , 2018Lubold, 2017). This vocal entrainment contributed to increased learning with undergraduate students as well as middle school students during math tasks, but did not increase self-reported rapport.…”

Section: Speech Entrainmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Effects of a Social Robot's Speech Entrainment and Backstory on Young Children's Emotion, Rapport, Relationship, and Learning

Kory-Westlund

Breazeal

2019

Front. Robot. AI

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In positive human-human relationships, people frequently mirror or mimic each other's behavior. This mimicry, also called entrainment, is associated with rapport and smoother social interaction. Because rapport in learning scenarios has been shown to lead to improved learning outcomes, we examined whether enabling a social robotic learning companion to perform rapport-building behaviors could improve children's learning and engagement during a storytelling activity. We enabled the social robot to perform two specific rapport and relationship-building behaviors: speech entrainment and self-disclosure (shared personal information in the form of a backstory about the robot's poor speech and hearing abilities). We recruited 86 children aged 3-8 years to interact with the robot in a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental study testing the effects of robot entrainment Entrainment vs. No entrainment and backstory about abilities Backstory vs. No Backstory. The robot engaged the children one-on-one in conversation, told a story embedded with key vocabulary words, and asked children to retell the story. We measured children's recall of the key words and their emotions during the interaction, examined their story retellings, and asked children questions about their relationship with the robot. We found that the robot's entrainment led children to show more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. Children who heard the robot's backstory were more likely to accept the robot's poor hearing abilities. Entrainment paired with backstory led children to use more of the key words and match more of the robot's phrases in their story retells. Furthermore, these children were more likely to consider the robot more human-like and were more likely to comply with one of the robot's requests. These results suggest that the robot's speech entrainment and backstory increased children's engagement and enjoyment in the interaction, improved their perception of the relationship, and contributed to children's success at retelling the story.

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“…Entrainment is the tendency of speakers to begin behaving like one another in conversation. The development of methods for automatically quantifying entrainment in text and speech data is an active research area, as entrainment has been shown to correlate with outcomes such as success measures and social variables for a variety of phenomena, e.g., acoustic-prosodic, lexical, and syntactic (Nenkova et al, 2008;Reitter and Moore, 2007;Mitchell et al, 2012;Levitan et al, 2012;Lee et al, 2011;Stoyanchev and Stent, 2009;Lopes et al, 2013;Lubold and Pon-Barry, 2014;Moon et al, 2014;Sinha and Cassell, 2015;Lubold et al, 2015). One of the main measures of entrainment is convergence which is the main focus of this paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%