The relationship between utterances and "involvement" in conversational dialogue

Abstract

The performance of a non-task-oriented conversational dialogue system greatly depends on whether it can generate high involvement during conversation with users. In this paper, we clarify the types of utterances concerning involvement in human-human conversational dialogue. First, we define Dialogue Acts(DAs) and Rhetorical Relations(RRs), and propose a method for measuring "Involvement". Next, we show that the inter-annotator agreement on these tag schemes is quite high. Finally, we investigate the relationship between DAs/RRs and Involvement. We found that affective utterances and cooperative utterances are significant to generate high involvement in conversational dialogue.