Dodging the Question in Competitive Spoken Dialogs: Semantic and Prosodic Characteristics

Authors: Uwe D. Reichel, Piroska Lendvai

Abstract:

We examined conversational non-cooperation in human–human task- oriented dialogues in English. Our approach was to identify prosodic and semantic patterns that characterize replies to information-seeking dialogue acts of task-solving, in a corpus holding competitive and cooperative scenarios. Appropriate and inappropriate replies were manually defined on the dialog act level; all information-containing replies were characterized in terms of speech signal and semantic content (vocabulary, entropy, sentiment). We found that communicative means for dodging a question include reduced content-providing, increased negative sentiment and a stronger F0 declination trend. Some prosodic markers also indicate that holding back information increases the speaker’s cognitive workload.