We examine backchannel-inviting cues distinct prosodic, acoustic and lexical events in the speakers speech that tend to precede a short response produced by the interlocutor to convey continued attention in the Columbia Games Corpus, a large corpus of task-oriented dialogues. We show that the likelihood of occurrence of a backchannel increases quadratically with the number of cues conjointly displayed by the speaker. Our results are important for improving the coordination of conversational turns in interactive voice-response systems, so that systems can produce backchannels in appropriate places, and so that they can elicit backchannels from users in expected places.
Cite as: Gravano, A., Hirschberg, J. (2009) Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented dialogue. Proc. Interspeech 2009, 1019-1022, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2009-301
@inproceedings{gravano09_interspeech,
author={Agustín Gravano and Julia Hirschberg},
title={{Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented dialogue}},
year=2009,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2009},
pages={1019--1022},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2009-301}
}