Groupware systems often propose coordination protocols inspired from computer technologies. Such protocols are rigid compared to the subtle coordination hints and to the social rules used by humans. Protocols act as intermediate between users in the same way as command languages once did between users and tasks. We propose to reduce the role of those intermediates in what we call direct collabo...

The aim of this paper is to investigate how automatic prosodic labeling systems contribute to the evaluation of non-native pronunciation. In particular, it examines the efficiency of a group of metrics to evaluate the prosodic competence of non-native speakers, based on the information provided by sequences of labels in the analysis of both native and non-native speech. A group of Sp ToBI label...

When studying the relationship between prosody and attitudes, several authors have found that different attitudes can be expressed from the same sentence by reorganizing the prosodic parameters of duration, intensity and melodic variability8-10. Moraes and Stein8 have studied the attitudes of consideration, disdain, disappointment, irony, justification, obviousness and uncertainty. A single sen...

This study examines the relation between prosody and sentence-type perception in Greek, through a perceptual experiment using synthetic hum sound analogs of statements, polar/wh-questions and commands. The results indicate that sentence types may be partially identified through prosody. The identification rates were not very high, due to the nature of the synthetic stumuli. Wh-questions were ea...

In order to understand better the relationship between stress and tonal patterning of prosodic changes in spoken English, this paper examines articulatory and acoustic data of a large number of American English speakers producing prosodic minimal pairs on high and low-front vowels. Articulatory and acoustic measurements (from the x-ray microbeam database, University of Wisconsin) of 45 American...

One of the fundamental aims of prosodic analysis is to provide a reliable means of extracting functional information (what prosody contributes to meaning) directly from prosodic form. It has been argued that an explicit model of the mapping from prosodic function to prosodic form could provide an objective way of approaching this task. In this presentation we look specifically at some of the pr...

The paper proposes a framework for automatic prosody labeling. The labeling involves detection of the location of accented syllables and phrase boundaries, and recognition of pitch accent and boundary tone types. A number of classification models are designed to perform these tasks on the basis of small vectors of acoustic features. The models achieve high accuracy and their performance is comp...

This study investigates how different prosodic features affect native speakers' naturalness judgement of L2 English speech by Chinese students. Through subjective judgment by native speakers and objectively measured prosodic features, timing and pitch related prosodic features, as well as segmental goodness of pronunciation have been found to play key roles in native speakers' perception of nat...

We consider that factors such as prosody of systems’ utterances and dialogue rhythm are important to attain a natural human-machine dialogue. However, the relations between dialogue rhythm and speaker’s various states in task-oriented dialogue have been not revealed. In this study, we collected taskoriented dialogues and analyzed the relations between “dialogue structures, kinds of dialogue act...