# Enhancing Human-Agent Interaction via Artificial Agents That Speculate About the Future
## 4 Results
### Interruption Frequency  
Next, we evaluated whether adding anticipatory speech caused any changes in how frequently either the human interrupted the avatar, or vice versa. Interruptions here are defined as speech that overlapped the other player's speech (IPU), in contrast to waiting for them to finish speaking, regardless of whether it was accidental or not. In a broader sense, we can think of such interruptions as failures of proper turn-taking during a given social interaction [21]. Since there were differences in the utterance counts between language and condition (see Section 4.1), the interruption counts were calculated as a percentage of the total utterance count within each category, for fair comparison. In other words, they are frequencies based on the number of \"opportunities to interrupt\", rather than raw counts. The results can be seen in Table 2, broken out by language and by which speaker interrupted the other. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c} \hline \hline  & **Control (std)** & **H1 (std)** & \(p\)**-Value** & _Sign._ \\ \hline _English_ & & & & \\ Human & 122.66 (54.8) & 169.9 (79.29) & 0.15390 & \\ Avatar & 99.44 (18.02) & 135 (34.37) & 0.01250 & * \\ Avatar-planned & NA & 32.8 (8.92) & - & \\ Avatar-self generated & 79.33 (10.93) & 80.5 (20.24) & 0.87640 & \\ Avatar-ASR & 20.11 (11.24) & 21.7 (13.63) & 0.78640 & \\ \hline _Korean_ & & & & \\ Human & 35.1 (18.46) & 96.8 (52.35) & 0.00480 & ** \\ Avatar & 32.6 (17.68) & 119 (23.88) & 0.00000 & *** \\ Avatar-planned & NA & 48 (15.28) & - & \\ Avatar-self generated & 30.8 (16.87) & 66.2 (10.05) & 0.00002 & *** \\ Avatar-ASR & 1.8 (1.48) & 4.8 (4.05) & 0.04990 & * \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Utterance counts by condition and language (* <0.05, ** <0.01, *** <0.001). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c} \hline \hline  & **Control (std)** & **H1 (std)** & \(p\)**-Value** & _Sign._ \\ \hline _Condition_ & & & & \\ English & 2.96\% (3.30) & 3.70\% (2.10) & 0.40280 & \\ Korean & 0.76\% (1.29) & 5.16\% (3.89) & 0.00010 & *** \\ Overall & 1.80\% (2.77) & 4.43\% (3.21) & 0.00850 & ** \\ \hline _Speaker_ & & & & \\ Avatar—English & 4.20\% (3.09) & 4.56\% (1.78) & 0.65420 & \\ Human—English & 1.68\% (1.33) & 2.85\% (2.25) & 0.05250 & \\ Avatar—Korean & 0.90\% (1.57) & 8.09\% (3.40) & 0.00010 & *** \\ Human—Korean & 0.64\% (0.90) & 2.23\% (1.73) & 0.00080 & *** \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Interruption frequency by language and speaker (** <0.01, *** <0.001). Similar to what we saw in Section 4.1, for interruption frequency, all significant differences were on the Korean side, with none on the English side. The largest difference by far was with the Korean-speaking virtual avatar agent (Control--0.9% vs. H1--8.1%), which had a roughly 8-fold increase in interruption frequency. Meanwhile, on the English side, the agent's interruption frequency was virtually the same. There are a number of possible reasons why that may have occurred. For instance, perhaps English speakers, by nature, expect more anticipatory speech to begin with, so they leave more pauses during a conversation to allow for that. If so, that could explain why there was less of an effect of anticipatory speech on the English side for utterance counts in Section 4.1. This could also explain why the Korean speakers talked more during the H1 condition, if perhaps the unexpected anticipatory speech prompted in them an increased urge to respond to the agent. Perhaps it even reflects a cultural/linguistic difference in verbal planning behavior, which might be embedded in the structure of the language itself [65]. However, the above is just one possible interpretation that we considered, and there could be other interpretations. For instance, it could be related to differences in politeness levels across cultures. Alternatively, perhaps there are some non-verbal cues to turn-taking that are important on the Korean side, but not so much on the English side, which we unknowingly omitted due to the virtual nature of the interaction.