Capturing egocentric biases in reference reuse during collaborative dialogue

Words that are produced aloud—and especially self-produced ones—are remembered better than words that are not, a phenomenon labeled the production effect in the field of memory research. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether this effect can be generalized to dialogue, and how it might affect dialogue management. Triads (Exp. 1) or dyads (Exp. 2) of participants interacted to perform a collaborative task. Analyzing reference reuse during the interaction revealed that the participants were more likely to reuse the references that they had presented themselves, on the one hand, and those that had been accepted through verbatim repetition, on the other. Analyzing reference recall suggested that the greater accessibility of self-presented references was only transient. Moreover, among partner-presented references, those discussed while the participant had actively taken part in the conversation were more likely to be recalled than those discussed while the participant had been inactive. These results contribute to a better understanding of how individual memory processes might contribute to collaborative dialogue

The influence of conceptual (mis)match on collaborative referring in dialogue

When two dialogue partners need to refer to something, they jointly negotiate which referring expression should be used. If needed, the chosen referring expression is then reused throughout the interaction, which potentially has a direct, positive impact on subsequent communication. The purpose of this study was to determine if the way in which the partners view, or conceptualise, the referent under discussion, affects referring expression negotiation and subsequent communication. A matching task was preceded by an individual task during which participants were required to describe their conceptualisations of abstract tangram pictures. The results revealed that participants found it more difficult to converge on single referring expression during the matching task when they initially held different conceptualisations of the pictures. This had a negative impact on the remainder of the task. These findings are discussed in light of the shared versus mutual knowledge distinction, highlighting how the former directly contributes to the formation of the latter

Seeing or Not Seeing Your Conversational Partner: The Influence of Interaction Modality on Prosodic Entrainment

In speech entrainment research, a less investigated yet crucial aspect for modelling multimodal interactive dialogue systems is the influence of inter-action modality, i.e. whether conversational partners who are visible to each other would entrain their speech more with respect to when eye contact is inhibited, or not. In our study, we compared prosodic adaptation behaviour (convergence and synchrony) of the same speaker pairs involved in collaborative game sessions under two conditions: audiovisual vs audio-only interaction. Results provide a complex picture, with a tendency to vocal entrainment enhancement when the speech/audio channel is the only one available