Abstract not found

Research on speech and emotion is moving from a period of exploratory research into one where there is a prospect of substantial applications, notably in human–computer interaction. Progress in the area relies heavily on the development of appropriate databases. This paper addresses four main issues that need to be considered in developing databases of emotional speech: scope, naturalness, context and descriptors. The state of the art is reviewed. A good deal has been done to address the key issues, but there is still a long way to go. The paper shows how the challenge of developing appropriate databases is being addressed in three major recent projects––the Reading–Leeds project, the Belfast project and the CREST–ESPproject. From these and other studies the paper draws together the tools and methods that have been developed, addresses the problems that arise and indicates the future directions for the development of emotional speech databases.

This paper reconsiders those assumptions and describes an analysis of phrasing that we believe corrects many of the problems of the earlier version. Like the earlier version, it has been implemented in a text-to-speech system that uses a natural language parser and prosody rules to generate information about the location and relative strength of prosodic phrase boundaries

... document structure can be seen as an extension of Nunberg's `text-grammar'; it is also closely related to `logical' mark-up in languages like HTML and LATEX. We show that by using this intermediate representation, several subtasks in language generation and language understanding can be defined more cleanly.

The term ToBI has come to be used in two different ways. Originally, it was the name of an annotation system, developed in the period 1991 to 1994, which was designed for use in labelling intonation and prosody in databases of spoken Mainstream American English (Beckman and Hirschberg 1994). Very quickly, however, it also came to refer to a general

Intonational prominence, or accent, is a fundamental prosodic feature that is said to contribute to discourse meaning. This thesis outlines a new, computational theory of the discourse interpretation of prominence, from a FUNCTIONAL PROSODY perspective. Functional prosody makes the following two important assumptions: first, there is an aspect of prominence interpretation that centrally concerns discourse processes, namely the discourse focusing nature of prominence; and second, the role of prominence in language processing in general, and discourse processing in particular, is not essentially separate from the processing of other grammatical, nonprosodic information. This thesis develops a computational theory of prominence interpretation by explaining how prominence serves as an inference cue in discourse processing. Prominence signals changes in the attentional status of entities in a discourse model, while nonprominence signals that the realized entities are already in discourse fo...

Correct pronunciation of spoken language requires the appropriate modulation of acoustic characteristics of speech to convey linguistic information at a suprasegmental level. Such prosodic modulation is a key aspect of spoken language and is an important component of foreign language learning, for purposes of both comprehension and intelligibility. Computer aided pronunciation teaching involves automatic analysis of the speech of a non-native talker in order to provide a diagnosis of the learner's performance in comparison with the speech of a native talker. This thesis describes research undertaken to automatically analyse the prosodic aspects of speech for computer aided pronunciation teaching. It is necessary to describe the suprasegmental composition of a learner's speech in order to characterise significant deviations from a native-like prosody, and to offer some kind of corrective diagnosis. Phonological theories of prosody aim to describe the suprasegmental composition of speech...

The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in "and-uh"), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.

The ability to understand and manage social signals of a person we are communicating with is the core of social intelligence. Social intelligence is a facet of human intelligence that has been argued to be indispensable and perhaps the most important for success in life. This paper argues that next-generation computing needs to include the essence of social intelligence – the ability to recognize human social signals and social behaviours like politeness, and disagreement – in order to become more effective and more efficient. Although each one of us understands the importance of social signals in everyday life situations, and in spite of recent advances in machine analysis of relevant behavioural cues like blinks, smiles, crossed arms, laughter, and similar, design and development of automated systems for Social Signal Processing (SSP) are rather difficult. This paper surveys the past efforts in solving these problems by a computer, it summarizes the relevant findings in social psychology, and it proposes aset of recommendations for enabling the development of the next generation of socially-aware computing.

and prosody of dialogue