A corpus is described consisting of non-scripted monologues and dialogues, recorded by 27 speakers, comprising a total of about 70.000 words, corresponding to well over 10 hours of speech. The monologues were recorded as one-way communication with blind partner where the speaker performed three different tasks: (S)he described a network consisting of various geometrical shapes in various colour...

This paper presents the Dial-Your-Disc (dyd) system, an interactive system that supports browsing through a large database of musical information and generates a spoken monologue once a musical composition has been selected. The paper focuses on the generation of spoken monologues and, more speciically, on the various ways in which the generation of an utterance at a given point in the monologu...

A better understanding of the intonational charaeteristics of spoken discourse may lead to new empirical techniques for identifying discourse structure from speech, as well as new algorithms for enhancing the naturalness of synthetic speech. This paper summarizes results of pilot studies that demonstrate reliable correlations of discourse and speech properties, and reports findings on a new cor...

We propose a fine-grained annotation scheme for the analysis of information status in spoken language, subdivided into a referential and a lexical level. The taxonomy is easy to handle and allows for a precise and comprehensive way of capturing the informational differences between nominal expressions in texts. First results on the prosodic marking of an item’s information status in a small cor...

Boundary pitch movements (BPMs) are tones that occur at the end of prosodic phrases in Japanese and contribute to the pragmatic interpretation of certain utterance such as questioning, continuation, and emphasis. This paper investigates pitch range control of BPMs, which has received little attention in previous studies. Specifically, it examines whether downstep is observed in BPMs by analyzin...

Reflective thought, as sustained in writing, is ottributed to two-way communication between o content problem space and a rhetorical problem space. An instructional experiment involving sixth-graders aimed at helping them sustoin such a two-way process independently, in place of the more typical onewoy process of generating content and writing it out. Instruction included modeling of thinking a...

Speakers engaging in dialogue with another conversationalist must create and execute plans with respect to the content of the utterance. An analysis of disfluencies from Map Task monologues shows that a speaker is influenced by the pressure to communicate with a distant listener. Speakers were also subject to time-pressure, thereby increasing the cognitive burden of the overall task at hand. Th...

We have designed and constructed a mechanism for using caption text from broadcast television programs to analyze their content. In this paper, we describe the method by which captions are captured and translated from the raw video signal into text on the ViewStation. We also describe our Caption Parser, which analyzes the text and extracts information about the content of broadcast television ...