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Strategy-level Entrainment of Dialogue System Users in a Creative Visual Reference Resolution Task

In this work, we study entrainment of users playing a creative reference resolution game with an autonomous dialogue system. The language understanding module in our dialogue system leverages annotated human-wizard conversational data, openly available knowledge graphs, and crowd-augmented data. Unlike previous entrainment work, our dialogue system does not attempt to make the human conversation partner adopt lexical items in their dialogue, but rather to adapt their descriptive strategy to one that is simpler to parse for our natural language understanding unit. By deploying this dialogue system through a crowd-sourced study, we show that users indeed entrain on a “strategy-level” without the change of strategy impinging on their creativity. Our work thus presents a promising future research direction for developing dialogue management systems that can strategically influence people’s descriptive strategy to ease the system’s language understanding in creative tasks.