`are you sure you're paying attention?' - `uh-huh' communicating understanding as a marker of attentiveness

Abstract

We report on the first results of an experiment designed to investigate properties of communicative feedback produced by nonattentive listeners in dialogue.Listeners were found to produce less feedback when distracted by an ancillary task.A decreased number of feedback expressions communicating understanding was a particularly reliable indicator of distractedness.We argue this finding could be used to facilitate recognition of attentional states in dialogue system users.