We investigate the impact of disfluencies on the task of classifying natural human-human conversations into topics. Disfluencies are distinctive to spoken language, and their effect on a number of spoken language understanding tasks, including spoken language classification, remains largely unknown. We use a subset of Switchboard-I annotated for disfluencies and topics, and investigate the effe...

Machine translation of spoken language has made significant progress in recent years, however, translation quality is still limited due to specific idiosyncrasies of spoken language; including the lack of well-formed sentences and the presence of disfluencies. In this paper, we investigate the effect of disfluencies on Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and introduce an Automatic Disfluency ...

We investigated using structural events, e.g., clause and disfluency structure, from transcriptions of spontaneous non-native speech, to compute features for measuring speaking proficiency. Using a set of transcribed audio files collected from the TOEFL Practice Test Online (TPO), we conducted a sophisticated annotation of structural events, including clause boundaries and types, as well as dis...

The forensic application of phonetics relies on individuality in speech. In the domain, individual patterns verbal and paraverbal behavior are interest which readily available, measurable, consistent, robust to disguise telephone transmission. This contribution is written from perspective phonetic practitioner seeks establish a more comprehensive concept disfluency than previous studies have. A...

PURPOSE To verify the effect of delayed auditory feedback on speech fluency of individuals who stutter with and without central auditory processing disorders. METHODS The participants were twenty individuals with stuttering from 7 to 17 years old and were divided into two groups: Stuttering Group with Auditory Processing Disorders (SGAPD): 10 individuals with central auditory processing disor...

PURPOSE To investigate the fluency aspects of the oral narrative task in individuals with del22q11.2 syndrome and compare them with those of individuals with typical language development. METHODS Fifteen individuals diagnosed with del22q11.2 syndrome, both genders, aged 7-17 years participated in this study. They were compared with 15 individuals with typical language development, with simila...

One characteristic of infant-directed speech is that it is highly fluent compared with adult-directed speech. However, the speech that infants hear still contains disfluencies. Such disfluencies might potentially cause problems for infants during language development. We first analyzed samples of spontaneous speech in the presence of infants (both adultand infant-directed) and found that under ...

UNLABELLED This study examined the disfluent speech of 32 normally fluent monolingual, Spanish-speaking children from Puerto Rico. The total frequencies and types of speech disfluencies were examined in 15 children (8 girls and 7 boys) aged 3;5-4;0 years (M=3.76) and 17 children (8 girls and 9 boys) aged 5;0-5;5 years (M=5.18). When examining the total frequencies of speech disfluencies, result...

An experiment with an Estonian Constraint Grammar based syntactic analyzer is conducted, analyzing transcribed speech. In this paper the problems encountered during parsing disfluencies are analyzed. In addition, the amount by which the manual normalization of disfluencies improved the results of recall and precision was compared to non-normalized utterances.

Most disfluencies, I argue, are not truly mistakes. Rather, speakers design them as signals for coordinating with their addressees on certain of their speech actions. At the lowest level, speakers try to synchronize their vocalizations with their addressees’ attention. At the next level up, they try to synchronize, or pace, the presentation of each expression with their addressees’ analysis of ...