This paper describes classification of typed student utterances within AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system. Utterances are classified to one of 18 categories, including 16 question categories. The classifier presented uses part of speech tagging, cascaded finite state transducers, and simple disambiguation rules. Shallow NLP is well suited to the task: session log file analysis reveals si...

Previous research shows that two-year-olds’ third person singular -s and plural -s are produced more accurately in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position. However, only the third person singular is affected by coda complexity. This study explores these effects with possessive -s. Acoustic analysis of twelve two-year-olds’ elicited imitations examined the use of simple versus comp...

This paper discusses the utterance generation module of a spoken dialogue system for transactions. Transactions are interesting because they involve obligations of both parties: the system should provide all relevant information; the user should feel committed to the transaction once it has been concluded. Utterance generation plays a major role in this. The utterance generation module works wi...

Abstract In this paper, we show that Icelandic uses the phonetic parameters of speaking rate, duration and voice quality (VQ) to distinguish between information-seeking questions (ISQs) rhetorical (RQs). Specifically, durations are longer (speaking rate is slower) nonmodal VQs used more in RQs than ISQs. Our findings for temporal fit with previous studies on prosody various languages. With resp...

We investigated the effects of word order and prosody on word learning in school-age children. Third graders viewed photographs belonging to one of three semantic categories while hearing four-word nonsense utterances containing a target word. In the control condition, all words had the same pitch and, across trials, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utteranc...

The Cooperative Principle proposed by Grice is one of the most important pragmatic principles. An analysis from perspective cooperative principle conducted on selected humorous utterance American TV Series Friends. four maxims provide a relatively reasonable explanation towards mechanism behind utterance. aim to bring readers more profound understanding and appreciation nature humor.

A novel analysis of the syntax of utterance particles in Chinese is proposed in this paper. In terms of their diachronic origin, there are two types of utterance particles in Chinese, namely predicative utterance particles and non-predicative utterance particles, both of which are derived by a generalized syntactic schema. It is proposed that utterance particles are the complement of a function...

Hidden Markov Model is a popular statisical method that is used in continious and discrete speech recognition. The probability density function of observation vectors in each state is estimated with discrete density or continious density modeling. The performance (in correct word recognition rate) of continious density is higher than discrete density HMM, but its computation complexity is very ...

In this study we investigate the intonational characteristics of the four utterance types statement, wh-question, yes/no-question and declarative question. Readings of two German scripted dialogues were examined to ascertain characteristic features of the F0 contour for each utterance type. Final boundary tone, nuclear pitch accent, F0 offset, F0 onset, F0 range, and the slopes of a topline and...