An analysis of the timing of turn-taking in a corpus of goal-oriented dialogue

Abstract

This paper presents a context-based analysis of the intervals between different speakers’ utterances in a corpus of taskoriented dialogue (the Human Communication Research Centre’s Map Task Corpus. See Anderson et al. 1991). In the analysis, we assessed the relationship between inter-speaker intervals and various contextual factors, such as the effects of eye contact, the presence of conversational game boundaries, the category of move in an utterance, and the degree of experience with the task in hand. The results of the analysis indicated that the main factors which gave rise to significant differences in inter-speaker intervals were those which related to decision-making and planning the greater the amount of planning, the greater the inter-speaker interval. Differences between speakers were also found to be significant, although this effect did not necessarily interact with all other effects. These results provide unique and useful data for the improved effectiveness of dialogue systems.