Modeling Norms of Turn-Taking in Multi-Party Conversation

Substantial research effort has been invested in recent decades into the computational study and automatic processing of multi-party conversation. While most aspects of conversational speech have benefited from a wide availability of analytic, computationally tractable techniques, only qualitative assessments are available for characterizing multi-party turn-taking. The current paper attempts to address this deficiency by first proposing a framework for computing turn-taking model perplexity, and then by evaluating several multi-participant modeling approaches. Experiments show that direct multi-participant models do not generalize to held out data, and likely never will, for practical reasons. In contrast, the Extended-Degree-of-Overlap model represents a suitable candidate for future work in this area, and is shown to successfully predict the distribution of speech in time and across participants in previously unseen conversations.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Kornel Laskowski
• Keywords: ACL 2010, Computational Linguistics, Direct Multi-participant Models, Multi-party Conversation, Substantial Research Effort