Breaking the Pair: Evaluating Dyadic Interaction via Speaker Switching

Abstract: Speakers in dialogue continuously adapt their communicative behavior across acoustic, lexical, and semantic dimensions, a phenomenon known as conversational entrainment. Modeling this process requires representations that capture the global structure of interaction, yet prior approaches fail to disentangle dyad-specific patterns from speaker-specific traits, limiting their ability to capture true conversational adaptation. We address this with the Dyadic Distance Matrix (DDM), which encodes all pairwise similarities between the turns of two speakers over an entire conversation, capturing long-range cross-speaker dependencies. This raises a key question: does the DDM represent genuine interaction, or merely reflect individual speaker characteristics? We propose the speaker-switch test, a principled control in which one speaker's turns are replaced with those from an unrelated speaker drawn from a different conversation. This preserves turn-level statistics while disrupting the original dyadic coadaptation. The ability to distinguish real from switched DDMs thus directly evaluates whether the representation encodes interaction-specific structure. Across four embedding types and classifiers including ResNet-50 on the CANDOR corpus, real DDMs are consistently distinguishable from their switched counterparts. Comparisons with LibriSpeech show higher discriminability in read speech, highlighting the role of prosodic variability in naturalistic conversations. GradCAM analysis further reveals distinct structural signatures driving classification. These results establish the speaker-switch test as a robust diagnostic for validating representations of dyadic conversational interaction.