Comparative Analysis of verbal alignment in human-human and human-agent interactions

Abstract : Engagement is an important feature in human-human and human-agent interaction. In this paper, we investigate lexical alignment as a cue of engagement, relying on two different corpora : CID and SEMAINE. Our final goal is to build a virtual conversational character that could use alignment strategies to maintain user's engagement. To do so, we investigate two alignment processes : shared vocabulary and other-repetitions. A quantitative and qualitative approach is proposed to characterize these aspects in human-human (CID) and human-operator (SEMAINE) interactions. Our results show that these processes are observable in both corpora, indicating a stable pattern that can be further modelled in conversational agents.