Modeling disfluencies in conversational speech

Conversational speech is notably di erent from read speech in several ways, particularly in the presence of dis uencies but also in the frequent use of a small set of words that mark the ow of the discourse. Dis uencies are sometimes viewed as a \problem" in language modeling, where most previous work has focused on written text. In this paper, we take the view that dis uencies provide information themselves. In particular, we give evidence that lled pauses serve di erent functions, including marking linguistic unit and restart boundaries, and signaling hesitation where the speaker wants to hold the oor. The di erent functions can be connected to similar functions of other words common in spontaneous but not written speech, and the particular function a ects the word conditioning choices in a variable ngram model. Thus, at least some of the idiosyncrasies of spontaneous speech can be viewed as a source of information for language modeling rather than an interruption in the linguistic structure.