Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented dialogue

We examine BACKCHANNEL-INVITING CUES — distinct prosodic, acoustic and lexical events in the speaker’s speech that tend to precede a short response produced by the interlocutor to convey continued attention — in the Columbia Games Corpus, a large corpus of task-oriented dialogues. We show that the likelihood of occurrence of a backchannel increases quadratically with the number of cues conjointly displayed by the speaker. Our results are important for improving the coordination of conversational turns in interactive voice-response systems, so that systems can produce backchannels in appropriate places, and so that they can elicit backchannels from users in expected places.