This study tested whether older speakers are ‘more dialectal’ than younger speakers, and whether men are more dialectal than women. Speech material from the Arjeplog dialect was used in a listening test and a set of durational measurements of preaspiration and VOT. In the listening test, unscripted monologues produced by 3 men and 3 women of an older generation, and 3 men and 3 women of a young...

This paper analyses and compares term weighting methods for automatic verbal intelligence identification from speech. Two different corpora are used; the first one contains monologues on the same topic; the second one contains dialogues between two or three people. The problem is described as a text classification task with two classes: low and high verbal intelligence. Seven different term wei...

We implemented and evaluated a collaborative lecture module in an ITS that models the pedagogical and motivational tactics of expert human tutors. Inspired by the lecture delivery styles of the expert tutors, the collaborative lectures of the ITS were conversational and interactive, instead of a polished one-way information delivery from tutor to student. We hypothesized that the enhanced inter...

The extraction of important sentences is a key technique for automatic summarization. Whereas most research in this area has targeted written language, we are conducting research on spoken language monologues such as presentations and TV news commentary programs. We collected 50 TV news commentary programs, and experimented with the extraction of important sentences from transcriptions. We used...

Opportunities for co-produced digital media find users differentially involved within emergent and unfamiliar configurations of technologies, organizations, and complex information flows. Addressing the interaction patterns and rhetorical practices of the most frequent contributors to online discussion forums in comparison to the majority of infrequent contributors, this analysis considers the ...

Human communication is a complex multimodal behavior that is deeply embedded within our environment. From narrative monologues (Dale, 2014) to dyadic task performance (Paxton, Abney, Kello, & Dale, 2014), recent efforts have sought to identify multimodal signatures of different types of communication. We extend these efforts in the current project by investigating the multimodal signatures of l...

Although the perceptual reality of speech rhythm has not been unambiguously observed in acoustic correlates, speech has always been considered as rhythmic one way or another. This study looks at speech rhythm in spontaneous speech and its relationship to discourse and syntactic units. Two four-frame comic strips were used to elicit speech, and syllable onsets were measured from waveform/spectro...

There is much evidence in the literature that speakers tend to deaccent discourse-given entities, while accenting new ones. However, speakers do not always follow this simple strategy and the causes for such variation are not yet well understood. In this paper, we describe several new forms of variability in the relationship between given/new information and accenting behavior, variation due to...

Currently, bandwidth limitations pose a major challenge for delivering high-quality multimedia information to users. In this research, we aim to provide a better compression of human-centered video sequences such as lectures, monologues, and presentations. Based on the idea that people pay more attention to face and hand regions in videos containing people speaking, our approach encodes those r...

Theories of discourse structure hypothesize a hierarchical structure of discourse segments, typically tree-structured. While substantial work has been done on identifying and automatically recognizing the textual and prosodic correlates of discourse structure in monologue, comparable cues for dialogue or multiparty conversation, and in particular humancomputer dialogue remain relatively less st...