Related papers: Representation of perceived prosodic similarity of…

Backchannels (e.g., `yeah', `mhm', and `right') are short, non-interruptive feedback signals whose lexical form and prosody jointly convey pragmatic meaning. While prior computational research has largely focused on predicting backchannel…

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…

Prosody is essential for speech technology, shaping comprehension, naturalness, and expressiveness. However, current text-to-speech (TTS) systems still struggle to accurately capture human-like prosodic variation, in part because existing…

We investigate which prosodic features matter most in conveying prosodic functions. We use the problem of predicting human perceptions of pragmatic similarity among utterance pairs to evaluate the utility of prosodic features of different…

Short feedback responses, such as backchannels, play an important role in spoken dialogue. So far, most of the modeling of feedback responses has focused on their timing, often neglecting how their lexical and prosodic form influence their…

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…

Objective metrics for emotional expressiveness are vital for speech generation, particularly in expressive synthesis and voice conversion requiring emotional prosody transfer. To quantify this, the field widely relies on emotion similarity…

Prosody plays a vital role in verbal communication. Acoustic cues of prosody have been examined extensively. However, prosodic characteristics are not only perceived auditorily, but also visually based on head and facial movements. The…

Text-to-speech is now able to achieve near-human naturalness and research focus has shifted to increasing expressivity. One popular method is to transfer the prosody from a reference speech sample. There have been considerable advances in…

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…

While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…

Speaker identity plays a significant role in human communication and is being increasingly used in societal applications, many through advances in machine learning. Speaker identity perception is an essential cognitive phenomenon that can…

When human listeners try to guess the spatial position of a speech source, they are influenced by the speaker's production level, regardless of the intensity level reaching their ears. Because the perception of distance is a very difficult…

Emotions lie on a continuum, but current models treat emotions as a finite valued discrete variable. This representation does not capture the diversity in the expression of emotion. To better represent emotions we propose the use of natural…

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.…

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…

Individuals often align their speaking patterns with their interlocutors, a phenomenon linked to engagement and rapport. While well documented in task-oriented dialogues, less is known about entrainment in naturalistic, non-task and virtual…

The expressive nature of the voice provides a powerful medium for communicating sonic ideas, motivating recent research on methods for query by vocalisation. Meanwhile, deep learning methods have demonstrated state-of-the-art results for…

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…

Human speech can be characterized by different components, including semantic content, speaker identity and prosodic information. Significant progress has been made in disentangling representations for semantic content and speaker identity…