Tracing changes over the course of the conversation: A case study on filled pauses rates

In this paper, we suggest methods to trace the flow of the use of filled pauses over the course of the conversation. Beyond using a normalized time with respect to each session's duration, we calculated the accumulative number of filled pauses and the accumulative number of words per speaker, whenever the speaker has expressed a filled pause or a new word. We then computed the ratio between these values at each such point in time, resulting in relative filled pauses use. The output produces a visualization of the global contour slopes that represents each speaker and the dynamics between the two speakers, in terms of the relative filled pauses use. The dialogues are taken from MaTaCOp, the Hebrew map-task corpus, in which each speaker participated twice, once as a leader and once as a follower. Findings suggest that there are significant differences between two different speakers in the same session. We did not find a difference in the use of filled pauses between the same speaker in different roles. Moreover, the use of filled pauses shows convergence. These findings strengthen previous studies on the influence of sociolinguistic variables on the use of Filled Pauses.