Related papers: What Do Prosody and Text Convey? Characterizing Ho…
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…
Turn-taking is a fundamental aspect of human communication and can be described as the ability to take turns, project upcoming turn shifts, and supply backchannels at appropriate locations throughout a conversation. In this work, we…
Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels shape…
This paper links prosody to the information in a text and how it is processed by the speaker. It describes the operation and output of LOQ, a text-to-speech implementation that includes a model of limited attention and working memory.…
In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its…
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…
Whether a word was bawled, whispered, or yelped, captions will typically represent it in the same way. If they are your only way to access what is being said, subjective nuances expressed in the voice will be lost. Since so much of…
Information delivery via molecular signals is abundant in nature and potentially useful for industry sensing. Many propagation channels (e.g., tissue membranes and catalyst beds) contain porous medium materials and the impact this has on…
We often verbally express emotions in a multifaceted manner, they may vary in their intensities and may be expressed not just as a single but as a mixture of emotions. This wide spectrum of emotions is well-studied in the structural model…
Prosody plays an important role in characterizing the style of a speaker or an emotion, but most non-parallel voice or emotion style transfer algorithms do not convert any prosody information. Two major components of prosody are pitch and…
Speech language models refer to language models with speech processing and understanding capabilities. One key desirable capability for speech language models is the ability to capture the intricate interdependency between content and…
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…
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…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
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…
Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of…
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…
Prosody describes both form and function of a sentence using the suprasegmental features of speech. Prosody phenomena are explored in the domain of higher phonological constituents such as word, phonological phrase and intonational phrase.…
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…
Audio platforms have evolved beyond entertainment. They have become central to public discourse, from podcasts and radio to WhatsApp voice notes and live streams. With millions of shows and hundreds of millions of listeners, audio platforms…