This paper reports on a study of discourse prosody in a particular type of human-machine interactions, viz., information query in a travel-planning domain. More specifically, it deals with two related questions about the role of prosody in highlighting the status of an utterance in a given context. It investigates if speakers signal (i) the start of a new topic by marking the initial utterance of a discourse segment, and (ii) whether an utterance is a normal request for information or part of a correction sub-dialogue. The preliminary study reveals that in human-machine interactions both discourse segmentation and utterance purpose can have particular prosodic correlates, although speakers also mark discourse structure through choice of wording.
Cite as: Swerts, M., Ostendorf, M. (1995) Discourse prosody in human-machine interactions. Proc. ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, 205-208
@inproceedings{swerts95_sds,
author={Marc Swerts and Mari Ostendorf},
title={{Discourse prosody in human-machine interactions}},
year=1995,
booktitle={Proc. ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems},
pages={205--208}
}