Marc Swerts, Hanae Koiso, Atsushi Shimojima and Yasuhiro Katagiri
Echoing in Japanese conversations
Abstract:The study reported upon in this paper focusses on different functions of echoing in
Japanese dialogues. Echoing is defined as a speaker's lexical repeat of (parts of) an
utterance spoken by a conversation partner in a previous turn. The phenomenon
was investigated in three task-oriented, informal dialogues. Taking Traum's model
for grounding as a basis, repeats in this corpus were labeled in terms of whether
or not the speaker signals that he has integrated the other person's utterance
into his own body of knowledge. The investigation brought to light that the
level of integration is reflected in a number of lexical and prosodic correlates.
These features are discussed regarding their information potential, i.e., their signal
accuracy and comprehensiveness. In the future, the research needs to be extended
to a larger database and it should be checked experimentally whether the discourse
labeling can be reproduced reliably.