The Effect of Directed and Open Disambiguation Prompts in Authentic Call Center Data on the Frequency and Distribution of Filled Pauses and Possible Implications for Filled Pause Hypotheses and Data Collection Methodology
Robert Eklund · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2010
This paper studies the frequency and distribution of filledpauses (FPs) in ecologically valid data where unaware andauthentic customers called in to report problems with theirtelephony and/or Internet services and were met by a novelWizard-of-Oz paradigm using real call center agents aswizards. The data analyzed were caller utterances followinga directed or an open disambiguation prompt. While nosignificant differences in FP production were observed as afunction of prompt type, FP frequency was found to beconsiderably higher than what is usually reported in theliterature. Moreover, a higher proportion of utterance-initialFPs than normally reported was also observed. The results arecompared to previously reported FP frequencies. Potentialimplications for data collection methodology are discussed.