Linear Model Approach for Investigating the Comprehensive Entrainment in Conversation

Abstract

This study investigates the entrainment phenomenon, which is related to how speakers adapt to their partners in daily conversation. In contrast to previous fragmented studies, we propose a comprehensive approach that integrates various acoustic features and explores entrainment across multiple parameters, the comprehensived considered entrainment can be extracted using a linear model. We hypothesize that interlocutors utilize diverse strategies for modulating their speech features to reflect different dialogue scenarios. We calculate proximity, convergence, and synchrony metrics to differentiate conversation scenarios and propose a linear model to clarify how dialogue strategies modulate and integrate speech features. The results of evaluation with four types of conversations from the Golden Marriage corpus show that the proposed method outperforms principal component analysis in extracting integrated acoustic features and exploring entrainment across multiple parameters by the classification results. This research contributes to understanding how speakers adapt in conversations, offering insights into the intricate dynamics of entrainment and enhancing the accuracy of conversation scenario classification.