Assistant Professor Rivka Levitan. Entrainment, the phenomenon of conversational partners’ behaving more like each other in various ways, is an important feature for analyzing conversations. It is very common in human-human communication and is associated with high-quality conversations. Because more and more important conversations are happening between humans and virtual conversational agents, it would be useful for such an agent to be able to entrain to the person using it, to increase the rapport between them. However, there is still a lot that is still not known about entrainment, such as what causes it and why people entrain in different ways. The goal of this CAREER project is to learn more about entrainment in order to improve human-computer communication and to better understand human-human communication. This grant will support Professor Levitan’s entrainment research for the next five years and fund the collection of a new corpus of task-oriented speech to enable the analysis of important questions about entrainment. The project also includes a collaboration with Brooklyn College’s Linguistics Program to promote the participation of linguistics students in computer science. Images taken from Weise and Levitan, “Looking for structure in lexical and acoustic-prosodic entrainment behaviors,” Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018.
