Audio quotation marks for natural language understanding

Detecting the presence of quotations in speech is a difficult task for automatic natural language understanding. This paper presents a study on the correlation between three prosodic features present in a voice command and the presence or absence of quotations. These features consist of intra-word pause durations, F0 reset and F0 continuity. A combination of lexical and prosodic extraction tools was used to extract these features. The two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was then used to compare the distributions of the collected measures. The results show a correlation between these features and the presence or absence of quotations. Moreover, the results show that it is possible to use these features to differentiate direct from indirect quotations.