{"pk":21465,"title":"Pink noise in speakers' semantic synchrony dynamics as a metric of conversation quality","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Dyadic social interaction is a complex coordination task involving a large number of interconnected variables. Previous research has shown that metastability -- persistence for an extended,  but impermanent, period of time in a non-stable state of a system -- can be a useful lens for understanding what makes an interaction successful. However, this framework has thus far only been applied to para-conversational signals like heart rate and prosody -- not to the semantic content of a conversation. Here, we present pink noise analysis of semantic trajectories as a metric for conversational success and apply this technique to a large open conversation dataset. Our results demonstrate that pink noise in a conversation predicts a host of variables representing participants' perception of  conversation quality. These results have implications for optimizing a whole host of difficult dyadic conversations -- like those between political partisans -- and human-computer interactions, with applications for improving large language models' adaptability.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Dynamical Systems; Interactive behavior; Natural Language Processing; Situated cognition; Social cognition"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q474016","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Kathryn","middle_name":"","last_name":"O'Nell","name_suffix":"","institution":"Dartmouth College","department":""},{"first_name":"Emily","middle_name":"S.","last_name":"Finn","name_suffix":"","institution":"Dartmouth College","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21465/galley/11064/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21465/galley/21910/download/"}]}