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The ways in which human relationships are managed via language is a topic of particular interest in the area of sociolinguistics where work into the study of such topics as politeness, impoliteness, and rapport management have attempted to shed light on this phenomenon. This study examines two segments of extended

The ways in which human relationships are managed via language is a topic of particular interest in the area of sociolinguistics where work into the study of such topics as politeness, impoliteness, and rapport management have attempted to shed light on this phenomenon. This study examines two segments of extended discourse by President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia at the 2008 Summit of the Rio Group where he addressed a gathering of Rio Group members comprising heads of state from Latin American and Caribbean nations. Faced with serious accusations about his nation's military actions into Ecuador a few days before the meeting in question, Uribe engaged the group through two extended statements where he defended his government's actions. In these two segments of discourse Uribe changed his tone; it is this change that the present study attempts to describe in terms of modification to the effects of his discourse on the relationship between himself and the other interlocutors. To this end, an analysis is done classifying Uribe's utterances as polite, per Brown and Levinson's politeness model, and impolite, per Culpeper's impoliteness model. Additionally, Spencer Oatey's model of rapport management is used to classify Uribe's utterances according to their effect on the components of rapport. These classifications are examined alongside an analysis of factors related to rapport management such as frame, purpose of the exchange, and participants, for the purpose of understanding how these many factors work together to generate a changed effect to rapport. Of greatest significance in this study is the relationship between (im)politeness strategies and components of rapport. This dynamic provided an interesting way of examining (im)politeness in a new context, one that factored-in the effects of (im)politeness to the relationship between interlocutors. The study, as described above, showed that Uribe's change in tone was indeed a change to approach to rapport management characterized by an initial focus on the transactional and relational goals rapport component in the first of two segments, that then changed in the second part to a focus on face and association rights.
ContributorsBambaren, Anamaria (Author) / García Fernandez, Carmen (Thesis advisor) / Cerron-Palomino, Alvaro (Committee member) / Adams, Karen L. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
With advances in automatic speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems are assuming increasingly social roles. There is a growing need for these systems to be socially responsive, capable of building rapport with users. In human-human interactions, rapport is critical to patient-doctor communication, conflict resolution, educational interactions, and social engagement. Rapport between

With advances in automatic speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems are assuming increasingly social roles. There is a growing need for these systems to be socially responsive, capable of building rapport with users. In human-human interactions, rapport is critical to patient-doctor communication, conflict resolution, educational interactions, and social engagement. Rapport between people promotes successful collaboration, motivation, and task success. Dialogue systems which can build rapport with their user may produce similar effects, personalizing interactions to create better outcomes.

This dissertation focuses on how dialogue systems can build rapport utilizing acoustic-prosodic entrainment. Acoustic-prosodic entrainment occurs when individuals adapt their acoustic-prosodic features of speech, such as tone of voice or loudness, to one another over the course of a conversation. Correlated with liking and task success, a dialogue system which entrains may enhance rapport. Entrainment, however, is very challenging to model. People entrain on different features in many ways and how to design entrainment to build rapport is unclear. The first goal of this dissertation is to explore how acoustic-prosodic entrainment can be modeled to build rapport.

Towards this goal, this work presents a series of studies comparing, evaluating, and iterating on the design of entrainment, motivated and informed by human-human dialogue. These models of entrainment are implemented in the dialogue system of a robotic learning companion. Learning companions are educational agents that engage students socially to increase motivation and facilitate learning. As a learning companion’s ability to be socially responsive increases, so do vital learning outcomes. A second goal of this dissertation is to explore the effects of entrainment on concrete outcomes such as learning in interactions with robotic learning companions.

This dissertation results in contributions both technical and theoretical. Technical contributions include a robust and modular dialogue system capable of producing prosodic entrainment and other socially-responsive behavior. One of the first systems of its kind, the results demonstrate that an entraining, social learning companion can positively build rapport and increase learning. This dissertation provides support for exploring phenomena like entrainment to enhance factors such as rapport and learning and provides a platform with which to explore these phenomena in future work.
ContributorsLubold, Nichola Anne (Author) / Walker, Erin (Thesis advisor) / Pon-Barry, Heather (Thesis advisor) / Litman, Diane (Committee member) / VanLehn, Kurt (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018