From "um" to "yeah": Producing, predicting, and regulating information flow in human conversation

arXiv:2403.08890v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Conversation demands attention. Speakers must call words to mind, listeners must make sense of them, and both together must negotiate this flow of information, all in fractions of a second. We used large language models to study how this works in a large-scale dataset of English-language conversation, the CANDOR corpus. We provide a new estimate of the information density of unstructured conversation, of approximately 13 bits/second, and find significant effects associated with the cognitive load …

abstract arxiv attention call conversation cs.cl cs.it flow fractions human information language language models large language large language models math.it mind q-bio.nc sense speakers study them together type words