CoFee - Toward a multidimensional analysis of conversational feedback, the case of French language

Conversational feedback is mostly performed through short utterances such as yeah, mhmm, okay not produced by the main speaker but by one of the other participants of a conversation. Such utterances are among the most frequent in conversational data. They also have been described in psycho-linguistic models of communication as a crucial communicative tool for achieving coordination or alignment in dialogue. The newly funded project described in this paper addresses this issue from a linguistic viewpoint by combining fine-grained corpus linguistic analyses of semi-controlled data with formal and statistical modeling. The impoverished aspect of the linguistic material present in these utterances allows for a truly multidimensional analysis that can explain how different linguistic domains combine to convey meaning and achieve communicative goals.