Towards alignment strategies in human-agent interactions based on measures of lexical repetitions

Alignment of communicative behaviour is an important feature of Human-Human interaction that directly affects the collaboration and the social connection of conversational partners. With the aim of improving virtual agent communicative capabilities, and in particular its strategies related to (lexical) verbal alignment, this article focuses on the alignment of linguistic productions of dialogue participants in task-oriented dialogues. We propose a new framework to quantify both the lexical alignment and the self-repetition behaviours of dialogue participants from dyadic dialogue transcripts. It involves easily computable measures based on repetition of lexical patterns automatically extracted via a sequential pattern mining approach. These measures allow the characterisation of the nature of these processes by addressing various informative aspects