The ongoing Lothian Diary Project consists of 125+ audio/video recordings collected since May 2020 from residents Edinburgh and the counties in Scotland. diaries comprise self-recorded monologues or semi-structured interviews which participants discuss their experiences during different stages COVID-19 pandemic. Recordings were uploaded to an online survey that also consent, demographic informa...

Despite writing and speaking being related activities, their end-products are entirely different. However, previous studies have not shown consistency in terms of grammar use these two modes. Accordingly, the present study, I aim to define syntactic characteristics modes with large-scale data organized research designs. This study examined 14 indices complexity specific factors 224 monologues 1...

This research used vicarious-learning procedures in an attempt to increase students’ knowledge of the domain and enhance the quality of their questions in an intelligent tutoringsystem involving computer-controlled animated agents. Students who overheard a dialogue in which a virtual tutee asked a virtual tutor questions during acquisition wrote significantly more in free recall and asked signi...

In applications of spoken monologue processing such as simultaneous machine interpretation and real-time captions generation, incremental language parsing is strongly required. This paper proposes a technique for incremental dependency parsing of Japanese spoken monologue on a clause-by-clause basis. The technique identifies the clauses based on clause boundaries analysis, analyzes the dependen...

Storytelling can be used by conversational agents in a wide variety of domains to maintain user engagement, both within a single interaction and over dozens or hundreds of interactions over time. The majority of agents designed with this ability to date deliver their stories as monologues without user input. However, people rarely tell stories in conversations this way, and instead rely on list...

Articulation and phonation is affected in 70% to 90% of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). This study focuses on the question whether speech carries information about 1. PD being present at a speaker or not, and 2. estimating the severity of PD (if present). We first perform classification experiments focusing on the automatic detection of PD as a 2-class problem (PD vs. healthy speakers)....

Recent research on multimodal prosody has begun to identify associations between discrete body movements and categorical acoustic prosodic events such as pitch accents and boundaries. We propose to generalize this work to understand more about continuous prosodic phenomena distributed over a phrase like those indicative of speaker engagement and how they covary with bodily movements. We introdu...

Recordings of careful readings and unscripted monologues in Swedish and Argentinean Spanish were auditorily and acoustically analyzed to test the hypothesis that temporal equalization of syllable-sized contoid-vocoid (CV) sequences typically occurs in casual as opposed to elaborated speaking styles. Results indicated 1) that CV durations and standard deviations appearing in unscripted Swedish t...