A Conversation-Analytic Annotation of Turn-Taking Behavior in Japanese Multi-Party Conversation and its Preliminary Analysis

Mika Enomoto, Yasuharu Den, Yuichi Ishimoto


Abstract
In this study, we propose a conversation-analytic annotation scheme for turn-taking behavior in multi-party conversations. The annotation scheme is motivated by a proposal of a proper model of turn-taking incorporating various ideas developed in the literature of conversation analysis. Our annotation consists of two sets of tags: the beginning and the ending type of the utterance. Focusing on the ending-type tags, in some cases combined with the beginning-type tags, we emphasize the importance of the distinction among four selection types: i) selecting other participant as next speaker, ii) not selecting next speaker but followed by a switch of the speakership, iii) not selecting next speaker and followed by a continuation of the speakership, and iv)being inside a multi-unit turn. Based on the annotation of Japanese multi-party conversations, we analyze how syntactic and prosodic features of utterances vary across the four selection types. The results show that the above four-way distinction is essential to account for the distributions of the syntactic and prosodic features, suggesting the insufficiency of previous turn-taking models that do not consider the distinction between i) and ii) or between ii) or iii).
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.81
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
644–652
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.81
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mika Enomoto, Yasuharu Den, and Yuichi Ishimoto. 2020. A Conversation-Analytic Annotation of Turn-Taking Behavior in Japanese Multi-Party Conversation and its Preliminary Analysis. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 644–652, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Conversation-Analytic Annotation of Turn-Taking Behavior in Japanese Multi-Party Conversation and its Preliminary Analysis (Enomoto et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.81.pdf