How Interlocutors Coordinate with each other within Emotional Segments?

In this paper, we aim to investigate the coordination of interlocutors behavior in different emotional segments. Conversational coordination between the interlocutors is the tendency of speakers to predict and adjust each other accordingly on an ongoing conversation. In order to find such a coordination, we investigated 1) lexical similarities between the speakers in each emotional segments, 2) correlation between the interlocutors using psycholinguistic features, such as linguistic styles, psychological process, personal concerns among others, and 3) relation of interlocutors turn-taking behaviors such as competitiveness. To study the degree of coordination in different emotional segments, we conducted our experiments using real dyadic conversations collected from call centers in which agent’s emotional state include empathy and customer’s emotional states include anger and frustration. Our findings suggest that the most coordination occurs between the interlocutors inside anger segments, where as, a little coordination was observed when the agent was empathic, even though an increase in the amount of non-competitive overlaps was observed. We found no significant difference between anger and frustration segment in terms of turn-taking behaviors. However, the length of pause significantly decreases in the preceding segment of anger where as it increases in the preceding segment of frustration.