Semantic and Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment of Dialogues in Service Scenarios

According to the Communication Accommodation Theory, speakers dynamically adjust their communication behaviors, converging to or diverging from their interlocutors in order to diminish or increase social distance, which is called entrainment. Most of the studies investigated the entrainment of the interlocutors in terms of linguistic and paralinguistic features respectively, but paid less attention to the (dis)entrainment relation between paralinguistic and linguistic ones. In this study, we employed BERT to extract the semantic similarities of turns within dialogues in service scenarios, and found the semantic entrainment. We also found that (dis)entrainments policies were adopted between acoustic-prosodic (paralinguistic) and linguistic (semantic) features. These findings will contribute to fully understanding the mechanism of entrainment in dialogue.