In conversation, when speech is followed by a backchannel, evidence of continued engagement by one’s dialogue partner, that speech displays a combination of cues that appear to signal to one’s interlocutor that a backchannel is appropriate. We term these cues backchannel-preceding cues (BPC)s, and examine the Columbia Games Corpus for evidence of entrainment on such cues. Entrainment, the phenomenon of dialogue partners becoming more similar to each other, is widely believed to be crucial to conversation quality and success. .
