Identifying Entrainment in Task-Oriented Conversations

Human interlocutors adapt their behavior to each other in a conversation through entrainment. While entrainment has been found in long chit-chat conversations, much less research has been conducted on task-oriented dialogs. In this paper, we investigate short task-oriented Wizard-of-Oz conversations for acoustic-prosodic and lexical entrainment. We conduct significance tests that reveal changes in speech pitch and frequent words as important indicators of entrainment. Our findings will guide user-entraining dialog systems to improve the quality of conversations.