On the functions of the vocalic hesitation euh in interactive man-machine question answering dialogs in French

This paper deals with the functions of the French vocalic hesitation euh in interactive speech of man-machine question answering dialogs. The present analysis suggests that the vocalic hesitation euh may carry various properties in speech, both disfluent signaling the speakers’ efforts to put the intended message under production into appropriate words, and fluent, as markers of discourse structure. Moreover, euh seems to play a role in bracketing lexical units, pointing to the informative content within an utterance. This bracketing may favour intelligibility or decoding fluency on the listener’s side. The potential contribution of the vocalic hesitation euh to lexical information bracketing is investigated with the goal of improved information processing by QA systems. Future objectives include a smarter interaction capacity by an appropriate usage of such euh items.