paper
arXiv cs.CL
October 26th, 2026 at 4:00 AM

A Cross-lingual Comparison of Human and Classification Model Entrainment Behavior in Code-switched Speech Settings

arXiv:2607.25202v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conversational entrainment is well-studied in monolingual and written contexts, but remains underexplored in spoken code-switching (CSW). We present a cross-lingual analysis of entrainment in Mandarin-English, Hindi-English, and Spanish-English dialogue, replicating and extending an established Spanish-English framework (Bhattacharya et al., 2024) to two new language pairs, and show that, while lexical entrainment generalizes across language pairs, entrainment over acoustic-prosodic and CSW style aspects exhibits context-specific variation. We build on these findings by asking whether classification models capture these human behavioral patterns. Using feature importance and ablation analyses, we find that classical and Transformer-based classifiers detect entrainment reasonably well but consistently prioritize features other than those most salient to human entraining behavior. Our approach introduces a human-grounded framework for evaluating model decision-making in multilingual stylistic contexts, and suggests challenges for developing conversational agents capable of producing naturalistic code-switched speech.

#ai

Get stories like this every Monday

The week's most important AI news in one email. Free, unsubscribe anytime.

Score: 2.82

Engagement proxy: 0

Canonical link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25202