We investigate whether probabilistic modeling of prosody can aid various automatic labeling tasks essential for processing of multi-party meetings. Task 1, automatic punctuation, seeks to classify sentence boundaries and disfluencies. Task 2, jumpin points, predicts locations within foreground speech at which background speakers start talking; Task 3, jump-in words, examines characteristics of ...

This paper evaluates the relative contribution of two prosodic cues, lengthening and f0 contour, in the processes of speech segmentation and storage of new words. More precisely, we investigate the role of prosodic information in the acquisition by French learners of a mini-language constructed for the experiment. The results show that presence of prosodic information facilitates the speech seg...

Atypical speech prosody is a primary characteristic of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), yet it is often excluded from diagnostic instrument algorithms due to poor subjective reliability. Robust, objective prosodic cues can enhance our understanding of those aspects which are atypical in autism. In this work, we connect objective signal-derived descriptors of prosody to subjective perceptions of...

Learning to group words into phrases without supervision is a hard task for NLP systems, but infants routinely accomplish it. We hypothesize that infants use acoustic cues to prosody, which NLP systems typically ignore. To evaluate the utility of prosodic information for phrase discovery, we present an HMMbased unsupervised chunker that learns from only transcribed words and raw acoustic correl...

In order to ensure smooth turn-taking between conversational participants, interlocutors must have ways of providing information to one another about whether they have finished speaking or intend to continue. The current work investigates Swedish speakers’ use of hand gestures in conjunction with turn change or turn hold in unrestricted, spontaneous speech. As has been reported by other researc...

Despite its very high relevance for human communication current spoken dialog systems usually ignore the prosodic variations in the speech signal [1, 2, 3]. In [4] it was shown that speakers use prosodic cues to highlight corrections in a dialog with a machine and that these can be detected using prosodic cues. We extended this idea in [5] to the audio-visual discrimination of prominent from no...

OBJECTIVE Behavioral experiments show that infants use both prosodic and statistical cues in acquiring language. However, it is not yet clear whether these prosodic and statistical tools are already present at birth. METHODS We recorded brain responses of sleeping newborns to natural sounds rich in prosody, namely singing and continuous speech, and to two impoverished manipulations of speech....

In this work we investigate the use of support vector machines (SVMs) and discriminative learning techniques on the task of automatic classification of dialogue acts (DAs) from prosodic cues. We implement and test these classifiers on solving an 8DA classification task on the Spanish CallHome database and report preliminary recognition rates of 47.3% with respect to a 20.4% chance-level rate, w...