Word and Dialogue Act Entrainment Analysis based on User Profile

Patterns of dialogue act and word selection are observable in dialogue. Entrainment is the factor that might account for these patterns. We test the entrainment hypotheses using the switchboard corpus, comparing speech of different speakers from different parts of the dialogue, but also speech of the same speaker at different points. Our findings replicate previous studies that dialogue participants converge toward each other in word choice, but we also investigate novel measures of entrainment of dialogue act selection, and word choice for specific dialogue acts. These studies inform a design for dialogue systems that would show human-like degrees of entrainment.