Dialogue co-construction mechanisms in social interactions

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. Conversational interaction is a complex dynamic and joint activity where all speakers participate in the construction of meaning and in the establishment of social relationships. Conversation requires permanent adjustments, coordination, adaptation on the part of the interlocutors. Providing interactive systems with the capacity to process and exhibit these dialogue co-construction mechanisms (e.g. turn-taking management, local and global interpersonal accommodation, backchannels, laughters) could however improve their efficiency and make machines more socially-competent interactants. In this talk, two automatic systems that have been developed for the automatic analysis of the prosodic dynamics of these coordination mechanisms will be presented. In particular, the PAD (Prosodic Accommodation Dynamics) model will be detailed and an investigation of prosodic accommodation (within and across conversation) and its functional aspects in social interaction will be reported. 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.