Measuring Mimicry in Task-Oriented Conversations: The More the Task is Difficult, The More we Mimick our Interlocutors

Solanki, V., Stuart-Smith, J. , Smith, R. and Vinciarelli, A. (2015) Measuring Mimicry in Task-Oriented Conversations: The More the Task is Difficult, The More we Mimick our Interlocutors. In: InterSpeech 2015, Dresden, 6-10 Sept 2015, pp. 1815-1819.

[img]
Preview
Text
124490.pdf - Published Version

273kB

Publisher's URL: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/interspeech/interspeech2015.html#SolankiVSS15

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.

Item Type:Conference Proceedings
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Smith, Dr Rachel and Vinciarelli, Professor Alessandro and Stuart-Smith, Professor Jane
Authors: Solanki, V., Stuart-Smith, J., Smith, R., and Vinciarelli, A.
Subjects:P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
P Language and Literature > PE English
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
Published Online:01 September 2015
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2015 The Authors
Publisher Policy:Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher

University Staff: Request a correction | Enlighten Editors: Update this record