Influences of Modality and Social Relationships on Building Common Ground in Remote Dialogues

Abstract

Building common ground in dialogue is important for effective communication. Our previous study demonstrated that rich modality and close social relationships between workers can facilitate building common ground in a remote collaborative task. In this study, we analyzed the factors that contribute to building common ground with the dialogue data collected in our previous study. The results showed that the switching pause was significantly longer in the condition where the modality was rich and the workers were close than in the other conditions. When the switching pause was longer, one worker tended to respond more thoughtfully to the other worker's questions. These findings suggest that the amount of utterances containing concrete information regarding the collaborative task is a key factor in building common ground smoothly.