Prosodic Plot of Dialogues: A Conceptual Framework to Trace Speakers’ Role

In this paper we present a proof-of-concept study which aims to model a conceptual framework to analyze structures of dialogues. We demonstrate our approach on a specific research question – how speaker’s role is realized along the dialogue? To this end, we use a unified set of Map Task dialogues that are unique in the sense that each speaker participated twice – once as a follower and once as a leader, with the same interlocutor playing the other role. This pairwise setting enables to compare prosodic differences in three facets: Role, Speaker, and Session. For this POC, we analyze a basic set of prosodic features: Talk proportions, pitch, and intensity. To create comparable methodological framework for dialogues, we created three plots of the three prosodic features, in ten equal sized intervals along the session. We used a simple distance measure between the resulting ten-dimensional vectors of each facet for each feature. The prosodic plots of these dialogues reveal the interactions and common behaviour across each facet, on the one hand, and allow to trace potential locations of extreme prosodic values, suggesting pivot points of each facet, on the other.