Linguistic repetitions, task-based experience and a proxy measure of mutual understanding

The way dialogue partners collaborate to achieve a joint task is dependent on the way they construct a common ground of knowledge. Diverse conversational mechanisms are involved in developing a common ground, and repetition phenomena appear to be strongly connected to these processes. This article describes the use of an automatic method to detect, within dialogue transcripts, linguistic cues of engagement and synchrony, by observing repetitions at different linguistic levels. We focus on the relationship between repetition patterns and task-based success in interaction with task-based experience and partner familiarity. We conduct our analysis on the data of the HCRC Map Task corpus. Results suggests that, among other patterns, significant amounts of repetitions play a role for unfamiliar participants, with greater success, in particular, at first attempts.