Measuring Mimicry in Task-Oriented Conversations: The More the Task is Difficult, The More we Mimick our Interlocutors
Year: 2015
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The tendency to unconsciously imitate others in conversations is referred to as mimicry, accommodation, interpersonal adap- tation, etc. During the last years, the computing community has made significant efforts towards the automatic detection of the phenomenon, but a widely accepted approach is still miss- ing. Given that mimicry is the unconscious tendency to imitate others, this article proposes the adoption of speaker verification methodologies that were originally conceived to spot people trying to forge the voice of others. Preliminary experiments suggest that mimicry can be detected by measuring how much speakers converge or diverge with respect to one another in terms of acoustic evidence. As a validation of the approach, the experiments show that convergence (the speakers become more similar in terms of acoustic properties) tends to appear more frequently when a task is difficult and, therefore, requires more time to be addressed.
Institution: University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2530434398