Turn-alignment using eye-gaze and speech in conversational interaction

摘要

Spoken interactions are known for accurate timing and alignment between interlocutors: turn-taking and topic flow are managed in a manner that provides conversational fluency and smooth progress of the task. This paper studies the relation between the interlocutors' eye-gaze and spoken utterances, and describes our experiments on turn alignment. We conducted classification experiments by Support Vector Machine on turn-taking using the features for dialogue act, eye-gaze, and speech prosody in conversation data. As a result, we demonstrated that eye-gaze features are important signals in turn management, and seem even more important than speech features when the intention of utterances is clear.