Turn Taking: A Tool for Dialog Processes

Turn-taking is the process by which participants in a conversation alternate speech and silence, it is an essential component of spoken interaction. I order to lead productive conversations, people need not only know what to say but also when to say it. Usually, we evaluate the whole communication process focusing our attention on semantic meanings of exchanged words, but actually this analysis cannot be automatically performed. In this paper we propose a method to extract information on the dynamics of the dialog processes through simple turn-taking quantitative measurements. Over 1000 research interviews made from students during their psychology university course have been analyzed. Each whole interview process has been considered as a complex system evolving in the time. Our approach founds on analogies between interviews and mathematical chaotic processes. The proposed procedure allows the extraction of information on the dialog evolution: phase portraits with anomalous paths indicate situations where the communication has been troubled from external references.