Simulating Turn-Taking in Conversations with Delayed Transmission

Thilo Michael, Sebastian Möller


Abstract
Conversations over the telephone require timely turn-taking cues that signal the participants when to speak and when to listen. When a two-way transmission delay is introduced into such conversations, the immediate feedback is delayed, and the interactivity of the conversation is impaired. With delayed speech on each side of the transmission, different conversation realities emerge on both ends, which alters the way the participants interact with each other. Simulating conversations can give insights on turn-taking and spoken interactions between humans but can also used for analyzing and even predicting human behavior in conversations. In this paper, we simulate two types of conversations with distinct levels of interactivity. We then introduce three levels of two-way transmission delay between the agents and compare the resulting interaction-patterns with human-to-human dialog from an empirical study. We show how the turn-taking mechanisms modeled for conversations without delay perform in scenarios with delay and identify to which extend the simulation is able to model the delayed turn-taking observed in human conversation.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
157–161
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thilo Michael and Sebastian Möller. 2020. Simulating Turn-Taking in Conversations with Delayed Transmission. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 157–161, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Simulating Turn-Taking in Conversations with Delayed Transmission (Michael & Möller, SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.20.pdf
Video:
 https://youtube.com/watch?v=9jerzgGw0pY