This paper examines the pauses, gaps and overlaps associated with turn-taking in order to better understand how people engage in this activity, which should lead to more natural and effective spoken dialogue systems. This paper makes three advances in studying these durations. First, we take into account the type of turn-taking event, carefully treating interruptions, dual starts, and delayed b...

We present a computational framework for stochastically modeling dyad interaction chronograms. The framework’s most novel feature is the capacity for incremental learning and forgetting. To showcase its flexibility, we design experiments answering four concrete questions about the systematics of spoken interaction. The results show that: (1) individuals are clearly affected by one another; (2) ...

This paper discusses how to build a system that can engage in a mixed-initiative human-machine spoken dialogue in which system utterances sometimes overlap with user utterances and vice versa. In the method, a module that incrementally understands user utterances and another module that incrementally generates system utterances work in parallel, and the timing of taking and releasing the dialog...

User satisfaction is an important aspect of the user experience while interacting with objects, systems or people. Traditionally user satisfaction is evaluated a-posteriori via spoken or written questionnaires or interviews. In automatic behavioral analysis we aim at measuring the user emotional states and its descriptions as they unfold during the interaction. In our approach, user satisfactio...

We propose a new method that detects conversation groups when multi-conversation groups exist simultaneously. The proposed method uses hands-free microphone arrays without wearable microphones. It has two main features: (a) We integrate a conventional turn taking-based conversation detection method with Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation-based Voice Activity Detection (VAD). (b) The proposed...

Interlocutors in spoken conversations have been shown to entrain, or become similar to each other, in multiple dimensions. We investigate the relationship between entrainment and turn-taking. We show that speakers entrain on turn-taking behaviors such as the distribution of turn types and degree of latency between turns, and that entrainment at turn exchanges is related to some extent to the ty...

This piece of work investigates the relation between characters in a play based on turntaking dialogues. As the dialogues are related to each other in the play, numbers of turn-taking are significant of the characters’ relationship and the utterances give indication about the information content of the interaction. In this Manipuri radio play, the sequence of turns taken by the characters conve...

Speakers strive to minimize inter-turn gaps when engaged in a dialogue. However, little work has addressed what impact this might have on the fluency of the following speech. In this paper we explore whether there are interactions between turn-taking gaps and turn-initial disfluencies and if the social pressure to respond to questions plays a role in that interaction. Our results indicate that ...

Fluent dialogue requires that speakers successfully negotiate and signal turn-taking. While many cues to turn change have been proposed, especially in multi-modal frameworks, here we focus on the use of prosodic cues to these functions. In particular, we consider the use of prosodic cues in a tone language, Mandarin Chinese, where variations in pitch height and slope additionally serve to deter...

Examining data from two national surveys of matched pairs of union and management lead negotiators, the authors evaluate the current state of practice in labor relations and test several propositions related to the transformation of American industrial relations. They find that 30-40% of the parties reported that they had introduced negotiated, workplace-level innovations or engaged in strategi...