TRACE: Temporal Relationship-Aware Conversational Entrainment Detection in Dyadic Speech
Authors: Sathvik Manikantan Napa Ugandhar, Hao Zhang, Alison Gunzler, Yuzhe Wang, Thomas Thebaud, Georgi Tinchev, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Laureano Moro-Velázquez
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, USA · Amazon Research, UK · Amazon, USA
With the proliferation of speech AI agents, understanding emotional entrainment in conversational interaction has become increasingly important. Emotional entrainment is shaped by social relationships and conversational context, influencing affective coordination over time. We introduce DyadEE, a dataset for emotional entrainment detection in dyadic speech interactions, containing both emotionally entrained conversations and synthetic interactions where entrainment is disrupted through partner swapping and emotion resynthesis. We further propose TRACE, a window-level framework that models dyadic interaction as ordered sequences of acoustic embeddings derived from emotion fine-tuned Whisper representations, treating each sample as an interaction trace rather than pooled utterances. Experimental results on DyadEE show that incorporating conversational context and relationship information improves emotional entrainment detection, with TRACE achieving the best accuracy of 97.01%.