Topic change detection based on prosodic cues in unimodal setting

Speech is considered as the most dominant way for people to interact with each other. But speech cannot be merely characterized as sequence of sound units. There are some non-verbal elements, such as prosodic cues, that lend naturalness to speech. Prosodic cues such as rhythm, stress and intonation are crucial to investigate because they play an important role in human-human as well as in human-machine communication. They help to compensate many hidden meanings omitted from spoken language. The goal of this study was to investigate the correlation between non-verbal acoustic cues and topic shift in unimodal setting and to show how prosodic information can be used as a signal to detect topic change within conversation.

[1]  Margaret Zellers.  Fundamental Frequency and Other Prosodic Cues to Topic Structure , 2009 .

[2]  W. Chafe.  Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view , 1976 .

[3]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Communication and prosody: Functional aspects of prosody , 2002, Speech Commun..

[4]  Gökhan Tür,et al.  Prosody-based automatic segmentation of speech into sentences and topics , 2000, Speech Commun..

[5]  Nivja H. Jong,et al.  Praat script to detect syllable nuclei and measure speech rate automatically , 2009, Behavior research methods.

[6]  James F. Allen,et al.  A Study on Prosody and Discourse Structure in Cooperative Dialogues , 1993 .

[7]  D. Sperber,et al.  Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading (To appear in Mind and Language) , 2001 .

[8]  How prosody marks shifts in footing in classroom discourse , 2011 .

[9]  Piet Mertens,et al.  The Prosogram: Semi-Automatic Transcription of Prosody Based on a Tonal Perception Model , 2004 .

[10]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Intonational Features of Local and Global Discourse Structure , 1992, HLT.

[11]  M. Taboada,et al.  Subjects and topics in conversation , 2010 .

[12]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[13]  R. Sandt,et al.  Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives , 1999 .

[14]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat: doing phonetics by computer , 2003 .

[15]  Bayya Yegnanarayana,et al.  Extraction and representation of prosodic features for language and speaker recognition , 2008, Speech Commun..

[16]  Anne Wichmann,et al.  Intonation in text and discourse , 2000 .