Related papers: Which Prosodic Features Matter Most for Pragmatics…

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…

Vocal feedback (e.g., `mhm', `yeah', `okay') is an important component of spoken dialogue and is crucial to ensuring common ground in conversational systems. The exact meaning of such feedback is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic…

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…

Prosodic cues in conversational speech aid listeners in discerning a message. We investigate whether acoustic cues in spoken dialogue can be used to identify the importance of individual words to the meaning of a conversation turn.…

Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…

This study investigates the acoustic features of sarcasm and disentangles the interplay between the propensity of an utterance being used sarcastically and the presence of prosodic cues signaling sarcasm. Using a dataset of sarcastic…

Audio deepfakes are increasingly in-differentiable from organic speech, often fooling both authentication systems and human listeners. While many techniques use low-level audio features or optimization black-box model training, focusing on…

In this paper, we propose a method of speaker adaption with intuitive prosodic features for statistical parametric speech synthesis. The intuitive prosodic features employed in this method include pitch, pitch range, speech rate and energy…

Reduced articulatory precision is common in speech, but for dialog its acoustic properties and pragmatic functions have been little studied. We here try to remedy this gap. This technical report contains content that was omitted from the…

Parsing spoken dialogue presents challenges that parsing text does not, including a lack of clear sentence boundaries. We know from previous work that prosody helps in parsing single sentences (Tran et al. 2018), but we want to show the…

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…

We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around…

Existing fake audio detection systems perform well in in-domain testing, but still face many challenges in out-of-domain testing. This is due to the mismatch between the training and test data, as well as the poor generalizability of…

Humans use social context to specify preferences over behaviors, i.e. their reward functions. Yet, algorithms for inferring reward models from preference data do not take this social learning view into account. Inspired by pragmatic human…

This work explores the application of various supervised classification approaches using prosodic information for the identification of spoken North S\'ami language varieties. Dialects are language varieties that enclose characteristics…

Automatic measures of similarity between utterances are invaluable for training speech synthesizers, evaluating machine translation, and assessing learner productions. While there exist measures for semantic similarity and prosodic…

The prosody of a spoken utterance, including features like stress, intonation and rhythm, can significantly affect the underlying semantics, and as a consequence can also affect its textual translation. Nevertheless, prosody is rarely…

The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…

Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…