Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment and Rapport in Collaborative Learning Dialogues

In spoken dialogue analysis, the speech signal is a rich source of information. We explore in this paper how low level features of the speech signal, such as pitch, loudness, and speaking rate, can inform a model of student interaction in collaborative learning dialogues. For instance, can we ob-serve the way that two people’s manners of speaking change over time to model something like rapport? By detecting interaction qualities such as rapport, we can better sup-port collaborative interactions, which have been shown to be highly conducive to learning. For this, we focus on one particular phenomenon of spoken conversation, known as acoustic-prosodic entrainment, where dialogue partners be-come more similar to each other in their pitch, loudness, or speaking rate during the course of a conversation. We examine whether acoustic-prosodic entrainment is present in a novel corpus of collaborative learning dialogues, how people appear to entrain, to what degree, and report on the acoustic-prosodic features which people entrain on the most. We then investigate whether entrainment can facili-tate detection of rapport, a social quality of the interaction. We find that entrainment does correlate to rapport; speak-ers appear to entrain primarily by matching their prosody on a turn-by-turn basis, and pitch is the most significant acoustic-prosodic feature people entrain on when rapport is present