Speaking More Like You: Lexical, Acoustic/Prosodic, and Discourse Entrainment in Spoken Dialogue Systems

When people engage in conversation, they adapt the way they speak to the speaking style of their conversational partner in a variety of ways. For example, they may adopt a certain way of describing something based upon the way their conversational partner describes it, or adapt their pitch range or speaking rate to a conversational partner’s. They may even align their turn-taking style or use of cue phrases to match their partner’s. These types of entrainment have been shown to correlate with various measures of task success and dialogue naturalness. While there is considerable evidence for lexical entrainment from laboratory experiments, much less is known about other types of acoustic-prosodic and discourse-level entrainment and little work has been done to examine entrainments in multiple modalities for the same dialogue. We will discuss work on entrainment in multiple dimensions in the Columbia Games Corpus. Our goal is to understand how the different varieties of entrainment correlate with one another and to determine which types of entrainment will be both useful and feasible for Spoken Dialogue Systems.