Nontrivial Lexical Convergence in a Geography-Themed Game

Amanda Bergqvist, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Deepthi Karkada, Maike Paetzel


Abstract
The present study aims to examine the prevalent notion that people entrain to the vocabulary of a dialogue system. Although previous research shows that people will replace their choice of words with simple substitutes, studies using more challenging substitutions are sparse. In this paper, we investigate whether people adapt their speech to the vocabulary of a dialogue system when the system’s suggested words are not direct synonyms. 32 participants played a geography-themed game with a remote-controlled agent and were primed by referencing strategies (rather than individual terms) introduced in follow-up questions. Our results suggest that context-appropriate substitutes support convergence and that the convergence has a lasting effect within a dialogue session if the system’s wording is more consistent with the norms of the domain than the original wording of the speaker.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
209–214
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.26
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.26
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amanda Bergqvist, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Deepthi Karkada, and Maike Paetzel. 2020. Nontrivial Lexical Convergence in a Geography-Themed Game. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 209–214, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Nontrivial Lexical Convergence in a Geography-Themed Game (Bergqvist et al., SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.26.pdf