Conflict Cues in Call Center Interactions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 428

Fig. 20.4 Percentage distribution of turn management labels assigned to customers and operators

In 63 min of 13 churn files, 1,455 turn management segments were annotated
with the respective set of labels and their distribution is depicted in Fig. 20.4 .The
second most frequent label, turn grab , indicates that there is a large number of
interruptions performed by both participants and seems to function like an effective
cue in tracing conflict. The distribution of labels per speaker role, i.e., customer
and operator, may vary, as shown in Fig. 20.4 . Most of the differences in speaker
roles are explained by the label semantics, i.e., it is expected that the operators
perform more turn offers by, i.e., asking customers questions, and that customers
accept the turn more frequently than the operators. There are nevertheless interesting
differences, especially regarding the turn grab and turn yield labels, the distribution
of which implies that both speakers are engaged on a more or less equal basis in
interruption instances and thus in conflictual situations.
Another conversational feature related to conflict according to the literature
(Sacks et al. 1974 ; Schegloff 2000 ; Schuller et al. 2013 ) is that of overlapping
speech, which is considered as a “violation” of the social rule that one party should
speak at a time and therefore may be informative of speakers' interrupting attempts
to grab the floor. Recent work has outlined the role of overlaps as a reliable cue
accounting for the presence of conflict and a sign of competition for having the
floor, focusing on their frequency and duration (Grezes et al. 2013 ).
In this respect, we calculated the overlaps between turn management labels by
directly exploiting the annotations, i.e., by extracting all instances where there is an
overlap between the conversational actions of the two speakers in a turn transition
point, as it is, for example, in the case where a speaker grabs the turn and at the same
time the other speaker yields the turn. Overlapping labels account for 31.6 % of the