Entrainment in SDS
Julia Hirschberg
CS 4706
7/15/2016
1
Entrainment/Adaptation/Accommodation/Alignment
• Hypothesis: over time, people tend to adapt their
communicative behavior to that of their
conversational partner
• Issues
– What are the dimensions of entrainment?
– How rapidly do people adapt?
– Does entrainment occur (on the human side) in
human/computer conversations?
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2
Varieties of Entrainment…
• Lexical: S and H tend over time to adopt the same method of
referring to items in a discourse
A: It’s that thing that looks like a harpsichord.
B: So the harpsichord-looking thing…
....
B: The harpsichord…
• Phonological
– Word pronunciation: voice/voiceless /t/ in better
• Acoustic/Prosodic
– Speaking rate, pitch range, choice of contour
• Discourse/dialogue/social
– Marking of topic shift, turn-taking
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3
The Vocabulary Problem
• Furnas et al ’87: the probability that 2 subjects will producing
the same name for a command for common computer
operations varied from .07-.18
– Remove a file: remove, delete, erase, kill, omit, destroy,
lose, change, trash
– With 20 synonyms for a single command, the likelihood
that 2 people will choose the same one was 80%
– With 25 commands, the likelihood that 2 people who
choose the same term think it means the same command
was 15%
• How can people possibly communicate?
– They collaborate on choice of referring expressions
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Early Studies of Priming Effects
• Hypothesis: Users will tend to use the vocabulary and
syntax the system uses
– Evidence from data collections in the field
• Systems should take advantage of this proclivity to
prime users to speak in ways that the system can
recognize well
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5
User Responses to Vaxholm
The answers to the question:
“What weekday do you want to go?”
(Vilken veckodag vill du åka?)
•
•
•
•
•
22%
11%
11%
7%
6%
• -
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Friday (fredag)
I want to go on Friday (jag vill åka på fredag)
I want to go today (jag vill åka idag)
on Friday (på fredag)
I want to go a Friday (jag vill åka en fredag)
are there any hotels in Vaxholm?
(finns det några hotell i Vaxholm)
6
Verb Priming: How often do you go abroad on holiday?
Hur ofta åker du utomlands på semestern? Hur ofta reser du utomlands på semestern?
jag åker en gång om året kanske
jag åker ganska sällan utomlands på semester
jag åker nästan alltid utomlands under min
semester
jag åker ungefär 2 gånger per år utomlands på
semester
jag åker utomlands nästan varje år
jag åker utomlands på semestern varje år
jag åker utomlands ungefär en gång om året
jag är nästan aldrig utomlands
en eller två gånger om året
en gång per semester
kanske en gång per år
ungefär en gång per år
åtminståne en gång om året
nästan aldrig
7/15/2016
jag reser en gång om året utomlands
jag reser inte ofta utomlands på semester det blir mera i
arbetet
jag reser reser utomlands på semestern vartannat år
jag reser utomlands en gång per semester
jag reser utomlands på semester ungefär en gång per år
jag brukar resa utomlands på semestern åtminståne en
gång i året
en gång per år kanske
en gång vart annat år
varje år
vart tredje år ungefär
nu för tiden inte så ofta
varje år brukar jag åka utomlands
7
Results
no
no
reuse
4% 2%answer
other
24%
reuse
52%
18%
ellipse
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Lexical Entrainment in Referring Expressions
• Choice of Referring Expressions: Informativeness vs.
availability (basic level or not) vs. saliency vs. recency
• Gricean prediction
– People use descriptions that minimally but effectively
distinguish among items in the discourse
• Garrod & Anderson ’87 Output/Input Principle
– Conversational partners formulate their current utterance
according to the model used to interpret their partner’s
most recent utterance
• Clark, Brennan, et al’s Conceptual Pacts
– People make Conceptual Pacts wrt appropriate referring
expressions made with particular conversational partners
– They are loath to abandon these even when shorter
expressions possible
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Entrainment in Spontaneous Speech
S13: the orange M&M looking kind of scared and then a one on
the bottom left and a nine on the bottom right
S12: alright I have the exact same thing I just had it's an M&M
looking scared that's orange
S13: yeah the scared M&M guy yeah
S12: framed mirror and the scared M&M on the lower right
S13: and it's to the right of the scared M&M guy
S13: yeah and the iron should be on the same line as the
frightened M&M kind of like an L
S12: to the left of the scared M&M to the right of the onion and
above the iron
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Extraterrestrial vs Alien I
s11: okay in the middle of the card I have an
extraterrestrial figure
s11: okay middle of the card I have the extraterrestrial
…
s10: I've got the blue lion with the extraterrestrial on
the lower right
s11: okay I have the extraterrestrial now and then I
have the eye at the bottom right corner
s10: my extraterrestrial's gone
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Extraterrestrial vs. Alien II
S03: okay I have a blue lion and then the extraterrestrial at the
lower right corner
S11: mm I'll pass I have the alien with an eye in the lower right
corner
S03: um I have just the alien so I guess I'll match that
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------S10: yes now I've got that extraterrestrial with the yellow lion and
the money
…
S12: oh now I have the blue lion in the center with our little alien
buddy in the right hand corner
S10: with the alien buddy so I'm gonna match him with the single
blue lion okay I've got our alien with the eye in the corner
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Entrainment and High-Frequency Words
• How does entrainment to another’s use of HFWs (the
N most common words in a corpus) affect the
perceived naturalness and task success in dialogue?
• SwitchBoard
– 2430 conversations, 6m mean duration, 240h
– 250 very natural; 250 ‘problematic’
– 100 HFWs over corpus  25 most predictive
• Um, how, okay, go, all, very, as, things, …
– HFWs predict naturalness w/ 63.75% accuracy
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• Columbia Games Corpus
– 9h8m, 12 conversations, subset: 48 tasks
– Scores logged for each game
– Labeled for turn-taking and other behaviors
– Results:
• 25 HFWs over corpus and game significantly positively
correlated with game score
• Common use of ‘affirmative cue words’ also correlates
with game score positively
• But entrainment in HFWs negatively correlated
w/smooth turntaking and response latency, tho
positively correlated with overlapping speech
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Timing and Voice Quality
• Guitar & Marchinkoski ’01:
– How early do we start to adapt to others’ speech?
– Do children adapt their speaking rate to their mother’s
speech?
• Study:
– 6 mothers spoke with their own (normally speaking) 3-yrolds (3M, 3F)
– Mothers’ rates significantly reduced (B) or not (A) in A-BA-B design
• Results:
– 5/6 children reduced their rates when their mothers spoke
more slowly
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• Sherblom & La Riviere ’87: How are speech timing and voice
quality affected by a non-familiar conversational partner?
• Study:
– 65 pairs of undergraduates asked to discuss a ‘problem
situation’ together
– Utter a single sentence before and after the conversation
– Sentences compared for speaking rate, utterance length and
vocal jitter
• Results:
– Substantial influence of partner on all 3 measures
– Interpersonal uncertainty and differences in arousal
influenced degree of adaptation
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Amplitude and Response Latency
• Coulston et al ’02:
– Do humans adapt to the behavior of non-human partners?
– Do children speak more loudly to a loud animated
character?
• Study:
– 24 7-10-yr olds interacted with an extroverted, loud
animated character and with an introverted, soft character
(TTS voices)
– Multiple tasks using different amplitude ranges
– Human/TTS amplitudes and latencies compared
• Results:
– 79-94% of children adapted their amplitude, bidirectionally
– Also adapted their response latencies (mean 18.4%),
bidirectionally
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Social Status and Entrainment
• Azuma ’97: Do speakers adapt to the style of other social
classes?
• Study: Emperor Hirohito visits the countryside
– Corpus-based study of speech style of Japanese Emperor
Hirohito during chihoo jyunkoo (`visits to countryside‘),
1946-54
– Published transcripts of speeches
– Findings:
• Emperor Hirohito converged his speech style to that of listeners
lower in social status
– Choice of verb-forms, pronouns no longer those of person with
highest authority
– Perceived as like those of a (low-status) mother
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Socio-Cultural Influences and Entrainment
• Co-teachers adapt teaching styles (Roth ’05)
– Social context
• High school in NE with predominantly AfricanAmerican student body
• Cristobal: Cuban-African-American teacher
• Chris: new Italian-American teacher
– Adaptation of Chris to Cristobal
• Catch phrases (e.g. right!, really really hot) and their
production: pitch and intensity contours
• Pitch ‘matching’ across speakers
– Mimesis vs entrainment
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Conclusions for SDS
• Systems can make use of user tendency to entrain to
system vocabulary
• Should systems also entrain to their users?
– CMU’s Let’s Go system adapts confirmation
prompts to non-native speech, finding the closest
match to user input in its own vocabulary
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Personality and Computer Systems
• Early-pc-era reports that significant others were jealous of the
time their partners spent with their computers.
• Reeves & Nass, The Media Equation How People Treat
Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and
Places, 1996
– Evolution explains the anthropomorphization of the pc
• Humans evolved over millions of years without media
• Proper response to any stimulus was critical to survival
• Human psychology and physiological responses well developed
before media invented
• Ergo, our bodies and minds react to media, immediately and
fundamentally, as if they were real
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People See ‘Personality’ Everywhere
• Humans assess personality of another (human or otherwise) quickly, with
minimal clues
• Perceived computer personality strongly affects how we evaluate the
computer and information it provides
• Experiments:
– Created “dominant” and “submissive” computer interfaces and asked
subjects to use to solve hypothetical problems
– Max (dominant) used assertive language, showed higher confidence in
the information displayed (via a numeric scale), always presented its
own analysis of the problem first
– Linus (submissive) phrased information more tentatively, rated its own
information at lower confidence levels, and allowed human to discuss
problem first
– Each used alternately by people whose personalities previously
identified as being either dominant or submissive
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User Reactions
• Users described Max and Linus in human terms: aggressive,
assertive, authoritative vs. shy, timid, submissive
– Users correctly identified machines more like themselves
– Users rated machines more like themselves as better
computers even though content received exactly the same.
– Users rated their own performance better when machine’s
personality matched theirs
• People more frank when rating a computer if questionnaire
presented on another machine
• Subjects thought highly of computers that praised them, even
if praise clearly undeserved
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Personality in SDS
• Mairesse & Walker ’07 PERSONAGE
(PERSONAlity GEnerator)
– ‘Big 5’ personality trait model: extroversion,
neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness,
openness to experience
– Attempts to generate “extroverted” language based
on traits associated with extroversion in
psychology literature
– Demo: find your personality type
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Conclusions for SDS
• Systems can be designed to convey different
personalities
• Can they recognize users’ personalities and entrain to
them?
• Should they?
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