Modelling and Evaluation of Lexical and Syntactic Alignment with a Priming-Based Microplanner

Abstract

Alignment of interlocutors is a well known psycholinguistic phenomenon of great relevance for dialogue systems in general and natural language generation in particular. In this chapter, we present the alignment-capable microplanner SPUDprime. Using a priming-based model of interactive alignment, it is flexible enough to model the alignment behaviour of human speakers to a high degree. We demonstrate that SPUDprime can account for lexical as well as syntactic alignment and present an evaluation on corpora of task-oriented dialogue that were collected in two experiments designed to investigate the alignment behaviour of humans in a controlled fashion. This will allow for further investigation of which parameters are important to model alignment and how the human-computer interaction changes when the computer aligns to its users.