Individual Interaction Styles: Evidence from a Spoken Chat Corpus

here is increasing interest in modeling style choices in dialog, for example for enabling dialog systems to adapt to their users. It is commonly assumed that each user has his or her own stable characteristics, but for interaction style the truth of this assumption has not been well examined. I investigated using a vector-space model of interaction styles, derived from the Switchboard corpus of telephone conversations and a broad set of prosodic-behavior features. While most individuals exhibited interaction style tendencies, these were generally far from stable, with a predictive model based on individual tendencies outperforming a speaker-independent model by only 3.6%. The tendencies were somewhat stronger for some speakers, including generally males, and for some dimensions of variation.