Related papers: Prosodic features improve sentence segmentation an…

Parsing spoken dialogue poses unique difficulties, including disfluencies and unmarked boundaries between sentence-like units. Previous work has shown that prosody can help with parsing disfluent speech (Tran et al. 2018), but has assumed…

A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction, topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically present for…

This work explores constituency parsing on automatically recognized transcripts of conversational speech. The neural parser is based on a sentence encoder that leverages word vectors contextualized with prosodic features, jointly learning…

In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features…

Identifying whether an utterance is a statement, question, greeting, and so forth is integral to effective automatic understanding of natural dialog. Little is known, however, about how such dialog acts (DAs) can be automatically classified…

The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…

Cross-speaker style transfer in speech synthesis aims at transferring a style from source speaker to synthesized speech of a target speaker's timbre. In most previous methods, the synthesized fine-grained prosody features often represent…

Spoken language understanding research to date has generally carried a heavy text perspective. Most datasets are derived from text, which is then subsequently synthesized into speech, and most models typically rely on automatic…

People exploit the predictability of lexical structures during text comprehension. Though predictable structure is also present in speech, the degree to which prosody, e.g. intonation, tempo, and loudness, contributes to such structure…

Prosody is an integral part of communication, but remains an open problem in state-of-the-art speech synthesis. There are two major issues faced when modelling prosody: (1) prosody varies at a slower rate compared with other content in the…

Prominences and boundaries are the essential constituents of prosodic structure in speech. They provide for means to chunk the speech stream into linguistically relevant units by providing them with relative saliences and demarcating them…

The relation of syntax and prosody (the syntax--prosody interface) has been an active area of research, mostly in linguistics and typically studied under controlled conditions. More recently, prosody has also been successfully used in the…

Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…

In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…

Speech-to-speech translation systems today do not adequately support use for dialog purposes. In particular, nuances of speaker intent and stance can be lost due to improper prosody transfer. We present an exploration of what needs to be…

In this paper we describe the linguistic processor of a spoken dialogue system. The parser receives a word graph from the recognition module as its input. Its task is to find the best path through the graph. If no complete solution can be…

This paper is motivated by the automation of neuropsychological tests involving discourse analysis in the retellings of narratives by patients with potential cognitive impairment. In this scenario the task of sentence boundary detection in…

The prosody of a spoken word is determined by its surrounding context. In incremental text-to-speech synthesis, where the synthesizer produces an output before it has access to the complete input, the full context is often unknown which can…

Recent advancements in neural end-to-end TTS models have shown high-quality, natural synthesized speech in a conventional sentence-based TTS. However, it is still challenging to reproduce similar high quality when a whole paragraph is…

Non-verbal signals in speech are encoded by prosody and carry information that ranges from conversation action to attitude and emotion. Despite its importance, the principles that govern prosodic structure are not yet adequately understood.…