This paper reports the results of a study on the prosodic marking of information status, i.e., whether information is ‘new’ or ‘given’ in the discourse, in Tokyo Japanese noun phrases (NPs). Previous investigations have indicated that such discoursal information is reflected in accent distribution in Dutch NPs, and in degree of accentuation in Italian NPs. An acoustic analysis of Japanese data,...

This paper presents an enhanced work from our previous paper [Chaisorn et al. 2002]. The system is enhanced to perform news story segmentation on a large video corpus used in TRECVID 2003 evaluation. We use a combination of features include visual-based features such as color, object-based features such as face, video-text, temporal features such as audio and motion, and semantic feature such a...

The effects of utterances such as cue phrases, keep-turn markers, and grounding signals cannot be characterized as changes to a shared record of the propositions under discussed: the simplest (and arguably most natural) way of characterizing the meaning of these utterances is in terms of a theory in which the conversational score is seen as a record of the discourse situation, or at least of th...

Information retrieval systems generally return a list of ranked documents, such as only the title and possibly a snippet that contains the words of the request allow a user to evaluate the document relevance relative to her initial request. This kind of result leads the user to browse a lot of documents before satisfying her information need. In order to improve information retrieval, we have s...

Pitch movements at the boundaries of sentence-medial and final phrases in Japanese can provide a cue to the speaker's intention. For example, the phrase /Nagano-de/ ' in Nagano' can be uttered with different rising and/or falling pitch movements on the the final mora /de/ to convey meanings such as clarification, incredulity, prominence in the discourse, insistence, etc. The identification of t...

The presence of an intonational phrase boundary is often marked by three major acoustic cues: pause, final lengthening, and pitch reset. The present study investigates how these three acoustic cues are weighted in the perception of intonational phrase boundaries in two experiments. Sentences that contained two intonational phrases with a critical boundary between them were used as the experimen...

The widespread use of computers throughout modern society introduces the necessity for usable and counterfeit-resistant authentication methods to ensure secure access to personal resources such as bank accounts, e-mail, and social media. Current authentication methods require tedious memorization of lengthy pass phrases, are often prone to shouldersurfing, and may be easily replicated (either b...

Multiple cues influence listeners' segmentation of connected speech into words, but most previous studies have used stimuli elicited in careful readings rather than natural conversation. Discerning word boundaries in conversational speech may differ from the laboratory setting. In particular, a speaker's articulatory effort - hyperarticulation vs. hypoarticulation (H&H) - may vary according to ...