Filled pauses occur frequently in spontaneous human speech, yet modern text-to-speech synthesis systems rarely model these disfluencies overtly, and consequently they do not output convincing synthetic filled pauses. This paper presents a text-to-speech system that is specifically designed to model these particular disfluencies more efffectively. A preparatory investigation shows that a synthet...

In this study, we investigate the correlation between silent pauses and discourse boundaries in the notion of theme shift. We examine three speaking styles in Swedish: professional and non-professional reading, and elicited spontaneous dialogues. Considerable attention is given to the syntactic and discourse context in which pauses appear, as well as the characteristics of the discourse structu...

Disfluencies such as self-repairs, filled pauses such as ‘um’ and silent pauses are pervasive in dialogue, but there is no consensus in the literature as to whether they reflect internal production pressures, or interactive issues – or how their effects are manifest in dialogue. It is well-known that patients with schizophrenia have problems with language and social cognitive skills, yet little...

OBJECTIVE We conducted intraoperative measurements of tremor during DBS containing short pauses (⩽50 ms) to determine if there is a minimum pause duration that preserves tremor suppression. METHODS Nine subjects with ET and thalamic DBS participated during IPG replacement surgery. Patterns of DBS included regular 130 Hz stimulation interrupted by 0, 15, 25 or 50 ms pauses. The same patterns w...

How does user personality impact pauses in online synchronous chat, and how do these pauses correlate with the development of trust in online teams? An analysis of hundreds of short chat sessions which took place between 62 pairs of participants in the DayTrader social dilemma game reveals a link between chronemic (time-related) variables and personality traits. The three chronemic variables th...

As dialog systems become more capable, users tend to talk more spontaneously and less formally. Spontaneous speech includes features which convey information about the user’s state. In particular, filled pauses, such as um and uh, can indicate that the user is having trouble, wants more time, wants to hold the floor, or is uncertain. In this paper we present a first study of the acoustic charac...

Transcriptional pausing by RNA polymerase (RNAP) plays an important role in the regulation of gene expression. Defined, sequence-specific pause sites have been identified biochemically. Single-molecule studies have also shown that bacterial RNAP pauses frequently during transcriptional elongation, but the relationship of these "ubiquitous" pauses to the underlying DNA sequence has been uncertai...

The focus on communications technology in recent years has led to the question of how to best display electronic text onto small-screened devices. Past studies have shown that the compact method of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) is e cient but not well liked. Two experiments were conducted to explore ways of improving the preference for and feasibility of RSVP. In experiment 1, the eŒ...

In this paper we propose a new algorithm for detecting if a person is under the influence of alcohol. This algorithm is based on number of pauses the speaker makes by judging that if the number of pauses compared to the previous recordings of the same person, which has been recorded beforehand, is higher. If so the algorithm mark the speaker as drunk. 1 Past works There are numerous researches ...

We have studied a novel class of DNA sequences that cause DNA polymerases to pause. These sequences have the central consensus Py-G-C and are not necessarily adjacent to hairpins in the DNA template. Since most consensus sequences do not cause pauses under standard conditions, additional template features must exist that make it difficult to incorporate nucleotides at these positions. We believ...