Modular Synthesis of Disfluencies for Conversational Speech Systems

Kurzfassung: It has been shown that dialogue systems benefit from incremental architectures to produce fast responses and to interact with the interlocutor in a more human-like way. The advantage of quick responses yields the disadvantage of running out of things to say for a while. In such occasions, humans tend to produce disfluencies as a listener-oriented strategy to signal the ongoing production process and to buy time for finalizing the turn. Introducing disfluency capabilities into a speech synthesis module of a dialogue system may therefore be a straightforward strategy towards conversational speech systems.