A Conversation-Analytic Annotation of Turn-Taking Behavior in Japanese Multi-Party Conversation and its Preliminary Analysis

In this study, we propose a conversation-analytic annotation scheme for turn-taking behavior in multi-party conversations. The annotation scheme is motivated by a proposal of a proper model of turn-taking incorporating various ideas developed in the literature of conversation analysis. Our annotation consists of two sets of tags: the beginning and the ending type of the utterance. Focusing on the ending-type tags, in some cases combined with the beginning-type tags, we emphasize the importance of the distinction among four selection types: i) selecting other participant as next speaker, ii) not selecting next speaker but followed by a switch of the speakership, iii) not selecting next speaker and followed by a continuation of the speakership, and iv)being inside a multi-unit turn. Based on the annotation of Japanese multi-party conversations, we analyze how syntactic and prosodic features of utterances vary across the four selection types. The results show that the above four-way distinction is essential to account for the distributions of the syntactic and prosodic features, suggesting the insufficiency of previous turn-taking models that do not consider the distinction between i) and ii) or between ii) or iii).