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Entrainment in Pedestrian Direction Giving: How Many Kinds of Entrainment?

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Situated Dialog in Speech-Based Human-Computer Interaction

Part of the book series: Signals and Communication Technology ((SCT))

Abstract

Human conversants in dialog adjust their behavior to their conversational partner in many ways. In terms of language use, they adapt to their partners both lexically and syntactically, by using the same referring expressions or sentence structure. In this paper, we describe a natural language generator personage-primed, which can produce utterances entrained to a range of utterance features used in prior utterances by a human user, and represented in the discourse context. Personage-primed can entrain to the user’s referring expressions, tense-modality selection, verb and noun lexical selection, hedge and cue word choice, and syntactic template selection, or any combination of these. To our knowledge, there is no other NLG engine that can dynamically generate all these types of entrainment in any utterance. We report an experiment testing all possible combinations of entrainment in a particular discourse context in order to test whether some types of entrainment are preferred, either because they make the utterance more natural, or because humans perceive the system as more friendly. Our experimental results suggest that human judgements of naturalness are distinct from friendliness: entraining on a user’s hedges increase perceptions of friendliness while reducing naturalness, while entraining on user’s referring expressions, syntactic template selection and tense/modal choices increase perceptions of both naturalness and friendliness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While use of pragmatic markers varies according to individual personalities, three was chosen to be a maximum value as it reflected an approximation of average use.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NSF CISE RI EAGER #IIS-1044693 and NSF CISE CreativeIT #IIS-1002921, and auxiliary REU supplements. The ArtWalk corpus was collected in collaboration with Prof. Jean E. Fox Tree, UCSC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Language and Dialog Systems Lab, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Zhichao Hu, Gabrielle Halberg, Carolynn R. Jimenez & Marilyn A. Walker

Authors
  1. Zhichao Hu
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  2. Gabrielle Halberg
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  3. Carolynn R. Jimenez
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  4. Marilyn A. Walker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhichao Hu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Alexander Rudnicky

  2. Cupertino, California, USA

    Antoine Raux

  3. Silicon Valley, Carnegie Mellon University, Moffett Field, California, USA

    Ian Lane

  4. Mountain View, California, USA

    Teruhisa Misu

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Hu, Z., Halberg, G., Jimenez, C.R., Walker, M.A. (2016). Entrainment in Pedestrian Direction Giving: How Many Kinds of Entrainment?. In: Rudnicky, A., Raux, A., Lane, I., Misu, T. (eds) Situated Dialog in Speech-Based Human-Computer Interaction. Signals and Communication Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21834-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21834-2_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21833-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21834-2

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