In human-human dialog, over 80% of the variance in prosody can be explained by just 20 prosodic patterns, most of which involve actions of both speakers and most of which last several seconds. In dialog these patterns frequently occur simultaneously, at varying offsets, and they are additive at the signal level and apparently compositional at the semantic/pragmatic level. These patterns provide a simple, non-structural way to model the prosodic implications of various functions important in dialog, including managing turn-taking, framing topic structure, grounding, expressing attitude, and conveying instantaneous cognitive state, among others. These patterns have been used for language modeling, for detecting important moments in the speech stream, and for information retrieval from audio archives, and may be useful for speech synthesis for dialog applications.
Cite as: Ward, N. (2013) Prosodic patterns in dialog. Proc. 8th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 8), 311-312
@inproceedings{ward13_ssw,
author={Nigel Ward},
title={{Prosodic patterns in dialog}},
year=2013,
booktitle={Proc. 8th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 8)},
pages={311--312}
}