Overlapping speech, utterance duration and affective content in HHI and HCI - An comparison

Abstract

In human conversation, turn-taking is a critical issue. Especially if only the speech channel is available (e.g. telephone), correct timing as well as affective and verbal signals are required. In cases of failure, overlapping speech may occur which is in the focus of this paper. We investigate the davero corpus a large naturalistic spoken corpus of real call center telephone conversations and compare our findings to results on the well-known SmartKom corpus consisting of human-computer interaction. We first show that overlapping speech occurs in different types of situational settings - extending the well-known categories cooperative and competitive overlaps -, all of which are frequent enough to be analyzed. Furthermore, we present connections between the occurrence of overlapping speech and the length of the previous utterance, and show that overlapping speech occurs at dialog instances where certain affective states are changing. Our results allow the prediction of forthcoming threat of overlapping speech, and hence preventive measures, especially in professional environments like call-centers with human or automatic agents.