相关论文: An Empirical Analysis of the Correlation of Syntax…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Prosody contains rich information beyond the literal meaning of words, which is crucial for the intelligibility of speech. Current models still fall short in phrasing and intonation; they not only miss or misplace breaks when synthesizing…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
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…
Recent advances in deep learning methods have elevated synthetic speech quality to human level, and the field is now moving towards addressing prosodic variation in synthetic speech.Despite successes in this effort, the state-of-the-art…
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Recent causal probing literature reveals when language models and syntactic probes use similar representations. Such techniques may yield "false negative" causality results: models may use representations of syntax, but probes may have…
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…
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…
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…