Testing the Effects of Acoustic/Prosodic Entrainment on User Behavior at the Dialog-Act Level

GAUDER, LARA; REARTES, MARISOL; GÁLVEZ, RAMIRO H.; STEFAN BENUS; GRAVANO, AGUSTÍN

Poznan

Conferencia; Speech Prosody 2018; 2018

ISCA

Entrainment has been documented across several dimensions ofhuman-human dialog. Experimental studies relating dialog suc-cess and acoustic/prosodic (a/p) entrainment in spoken dialogsystems, point towards a non-neutral effect of a/p entrainment.But results also suggest the presence of positive effects of disen-trainment. A plausible driver behind this last result could be thatin these experiments both users and avatars were restricted intheir use of dialog acts. In particular, systems only produced an-swers which entrained to the sole dialog act produced by users:requests for advice. Given that there is significant documentedcorrelation between dialog acts and a/p features, it seems rea-sonable to hypothesize that a/p entrainment may occur at thedialog-act level and that entraining or disentraining across dia-log acts may introduce misleading artifacts. This paper presentsthe design and implementation of an experimental setup whichallows to implement entrainment and disentrainment policies atthe dialog-act level. It also presents results of a pilot study inArgentine Spanish.