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20.4
Turn-Taking Structure and Conflict
Exploring the turn-taking structure in the conversation is closely linked to the
investigation of conflict, since conflicting exchanges may be traced in the structure
of the floor management. While compliance with the turn-taking rules guarantees a
successful flow of conversation, irregularities may indicate that there is a tendency
for disagreement and intensity, negotiation of opinions, and social situations and
thus may be associated with conflict. In an attempt to identify turn-taking cues or
patterns related to conflict, we added an extra data annotation level to enrich part of
the corpus with this information.
Conversations from the churn category were manually annotated with turn
management labels. Specifically, all turn transition points in the audio files were
marked on the time axis and were assigned with a label describing the type of turn
transition. The ELAN
1
editor was used with a set of labels mainly inspired by the
MUMIN schema (Allwood et al.
2007
) and with the addition of the backchannel
value as shown in Table
20.8
below.
Churn files were selected as a representative content category with regard to
conflict, since in this type of conversations, the participants pursue their own
individual and conflicting goals. The customers have acknowledged issues which
lead them to the decision of quitting their contract, while the operators attempt
to change their mind after inspecting their problems and suggesting solutions. A
typical attested behavior is customers complaining on noneffective services and/or
company's unfair behavior. The clients generally express distrust in the company's
services and the feeling of not being adequately protected in their customers' rights.
On the other hand, the operators try to soothe the customers' negative feelings
performing a series of planned actions devoted to resolve the inconsistencies among
customers' wishes and actual services provided by the phone company. We thus
believe that the churn category would be of particular interest to further study its
turn-taking organization.
Table 20.8
Turn management annotation labels
Turn management labels
Turn take
A speaker initiates the turn by introducing a new topic
Turn grab
A speaker takes the turn without being offered to do so, possibly by interrupting
Turn accept
A speaker accepts a turn that is offered
Turn offer
A speaker offers the turn to another speaker
Turn yield
A speaker yields the turn being under pressure or interrupted
Turn complete
A speaker completes a turn
Turn hold
A speaker attempts to keep the turn
Backchannel
A speaker produces acknowledgments and backchannels
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