Explorations in the Speakers ’ Interaction Experience and Self-assessments

The paper focuses on the interlocutors ' self-evaluation in Finnish and Estonian first encounter dialogues. It studies affective and emotive impressions of the participants after they have met the partner for the first time, and presents comparison of the evaluation along the gender, age and education parameters. The results bring forward some statistically significant differences between the two groups, and point to different, culturally determined evaluation scales. The paper discusses the impact of the findings on the complex issues related to the evaluation of automatic interactive systems, and carries over to such applications as intelligent training and tutoring systems, and interactions with robots, encouraging further studies on the interlocutors' engagement in interaction and their evaluation of the success of the interaction