From rule-based to data-driven lexical entrainment models in spoken dialog systems

Lexical entrainment of real users in the let's go spoken dialog system

This paper examines the lexical entrainment of real users in the Let’s Go spoken dialog system. First it presents a study of the presence of entrainment in a year of human-transcribed dialogs, by using a linear regression model, and concludes that users adapt their vocabulary to the system’s. This is followed by a study of the effect of changing the system vocabulary on the distribution of word...

Cohesion, Entrainment and Task Success in Educational Dialog

Researchers often study dialog corpora to better understand what makes some dialogs more successful than others. In this talk I will examine the relationship between coherence/entrainment and task success, in several types of educational dialog corpora: 1) one-on-one tutoring, where students use dialog to interact with a human tutor in the physics domain, 2) one-on-one tutoring, where students ...

Prosodic Entrainment in an Information-Driven Dialog System

This paper explores entrainment of two speaking styles, shouting and hyperarticulation, in an information-driven spoken dialog system. Both styles present difficulties for automatic speech recognition. We describe and evaluate the system’s detection and reaction mechanisms for these speaking styles, which involve deploying appropriate dialog-level strategies. The three strategies tested do indu...

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 o...

Towards a spoken dialog system capable of acoustic-prosodic entrainment