Gaze Behaviour & Conversation Unfolding in the HCRC Map Task Corpus

Abstract

Dialogue interactions have varied internal structure, with flow varying, inter alia, in face of both difficulty and agreement. This study investigates eye-gaze in the linguistic progression of interactions. We observe the relation of gaze to illocutionary functions of turns through dialogue acts, and to how turns present “new” or “old” content, through lexical entropy and repetition. Results on the HCRC Map Task corpus, enabled by an event alignment annotation method described, show how gaze is related to linguistic progression. A gaze towards the conversation partner at the end of a turn tends to align with complexity and difficulties being expressed in the turn, while keeping gaze down at the map is more typical of obstacle- and disagreement-free interactions. Addressees who look up or off at the start of a turn show evidence of lexicon adaptation to gaze values.