Spectral Analysis of Information Density in Dialogue Predicts Collaborative Task Performance
Yang Xu, David Reitter · 2017
We propose a perspective on dialogue that focuses on relative information contributions of conversation partners as a key to successful communication.We predict the success of collaborative task in English and Danish corpora of task-oriented dialogue.Two features are extracted from the frequency domain representations of the lexical entropy series of each interlocutor, power spectrum overlap (PSO) and relative phase (RP).We find that PSO is a negative predictor of task success, while RP is a positive one.An SVM with these features significantly improved on previous task success prediction models.Our findings suggest that the strategic distribution of information density between interlocutors is relevant to task success.