What turns speech into conversation? A project description

The project Vad gör tal till samtal? (What turns speech into conversation?) takes as its starting point that while conversation must be considered the primary kind of speech, we are still far better at modelling monologue than dialogue, in theory as well as for speech technology applications. There are also good reasons to assume that conversation contains a number of features that are not found in other kinds of speech, including, among other things, the active cooperation among interlocutors to control the interaction, and to establish common ground. Through this project, we hope to improve the situation by investigating features that are specific to human-human conversation – features that turns speech into conversation. We will focus on acoustic and prosodic aspects of such features.