Instruments for evaluating communication processes

When humans want to use language to communicate orally with each other, they are faced with a sort of coordination problem: no one monopolizes the floor but the participants take turns to speak. This important concept in linguistic interaction is called "turn-taking". Recent studies showed that turn taking depends on whether speakers have a specific task and role. Often the turn taking is guided by a set of rules that speakers in a conversation adhere to. In the Psychological interviews, i.e., speakers have a non-symmetric role in the conversation; one speaker is supposed to provide information about a certain task, while the other speaker should carefully listen to the interviewee, giving a set of accepting feedbacks. Usually, we evaluate this whole communication process focusing our attention on semantic meanings of pronounced words, but actually this analysis cannot be automatically performed. In this paper we propose the extraction of some information on the evolution of the interview process through simple turn taking quantitative measurements. Over 1000 research interviews made from students during their psychology university course have been analyzed. Each whole interview process has been considered as a complex system evolving in the time. Our approach founds on analogies between interviews and mathematical chaotic processes. The proposed procedure allows the extraction of information on the conversation evolution: phase portraits with anomalous paths indicate situations where the communication has been troubled from external references. Some parameters showing very good indication on the process evolution are proposed.