Syntactic Complexity induces Explicit Grounding in the MapTask corpus

Abstract

This paper provides evidence for theories of grounding and dialogue management in human conversation. For each utterance in a corpus of task-oriented dialogues, we calculated integration costs, which are based on syntactic sentence complexity. We compared the integration costs and grounding behavior under two conditions, namely face-to-face and a no-eye-contact condition. The results show that integration costs were significantlyhigher for explicitly grounded utterances in the no-eye-contact condition, but not in the face-to-face condition.