Online Meetings: When Repetition Signals Engagement

Online meetings are challenging environments to assess and foster engagement. By observing the relationship between engagement and lexical spread in the RoomReader corpus, a dataset that records the engagement of 3-4 participants during online sessions moderated by a tutor, we find evidence that dialogue participants’ engagement increases with the tutor’s back-channeling whereas the participants’ production associates with significantly greater engagement when it reuses words from the previous turns and builds on ideas.