Crosslinguistic Dis uency Modeling: A Comparative Analysis of Swedish and American English Human{Human and Human{Machine Dialogs

We report results from a cross-language study of dissu-encies (DFs) in Swedish and American English human-machine and human-human dialogs. The focus is on comparisons not directly aaected by diierences in overall rates since these could be associated with task details. Rather, we focus on diierences suggestive of how speakers utilize DFs in the diierent languages, including: relative rates of the use of hesitation forms, the location of hesitations, and surface characteristics of DFs. Results suggest that although the languages diier in some respects (such as the ability to insert lled pauses within`words'), in many analyses the languages show similar behavior. Such results provide suggestions for cross-linguistic DF modeling in both theoretical and applied elds.