To investigate the early stage of speech development, the phoneme duration in an infant’s utterances and in a mother’s infant-directed speech (IDS) was analyzed for an infant between the ages of 4 and 45 months. In infant utterances, the durations of vowels and special moras gradually decrease as a function of month in entire period, whereas consonants such as fricatives, plosives, and semivowe...

Acoustic feature similarity between utterances has been shown to be very helpful for spoken term detection using pseudorelevance feedback (PRF) and graph-based re-ranking. Both cases are based on the concept that utterances similar to those utterances with higher relevance scores in acoustic features should have higher scores, while graph-based re-ranking further considers the similarity struct...

This paper investigates the interaction between cultural evolution and biological evolution in the emergence of phonemic coding in speech. It is observed that our nearest relatives, the primates, use holistic utterances, whereas humans use phonemic utterances. It can therefore be argued that our last common ancestor used holistic utterances and that these must have evolved into phonemic utteran...

This paper provides a novel method to classify spoken utterances into reading style or spontaneous style. Read/spontaneous speech classification is important for extracting data to train acoustic models for speech recognition from real data in which read speech and spontaneous speech samples are mixed. We analyzed 23,900 reading and 31,988 spontaneous utterances of 30 speakers and found that va...

The automatic extraction of key utterances in spoken data has emerged as an interesting and difficult topic in automatic speech recognition. “Emphasis” or “excitement” may be a useful identifier for these utterances of interest. In this paper, we undertake the task of reliably and automatically identifying emphasized or excited utterances in natural speech in a meeting setting. We start by ende...

Building characters for dialogue agents is important in making the agents more friendly and human-like. To build such characters, utterances suitable for the designated characters are usually manually prepared. However, it is expensive to do this for a large number of utterances for various types of characters. We propose a method for automatically converting system utterances into those that a...

We investigate the effects of alternative utterances on pragmatic interpretation of language. We focus on two specific cases: specificity implicatures (less specific utterances imply the negation of more specific utterances) and Horn implicatures (more complex utterances are assigned to less likely meanings). We present models of these phenomena in terms of recursive social reasoning. Our most ...

The aim of this research is a human-oriented spoken dialog system which provides replies to a variety of users’ utterances. The example-based response generation method searches a question and answer database (QADB) for the example question most similar to a user utterance. With this method, the system can answer a question difficult for a model to express. A QADB is constructed from question a...

People often make utterances about the emotional state of someone or an event that happened in order to explain that person’s behavior. While there exist theories on behavior explanations, there is to my knowledge no study that focuses on the difference between emotion and event utterances that serve as behavior explanations. However, emotion as a mental state has a unique characteristic of bei...

Faced with the difficulties of finding an operationalized definition of backchannels, we have previously proposed an intermediate, auxiliary unit – the very short utterance (VSU) – which is defined operationally and is automatically extractable from recorded or ongoing dialogues. Here, we extend that work in the following ways: (1) we test the extent to which the VSU/NONVSU distinction correspo...