/nailon/ - Software for Online Analysis of Prosody

This paper presents /nailon/ – a software package for online real-time prosodic analysis that captures a number of prosodic features relevant for interaction control in spoken dialogue systems. The current implementation captures silence durations; voicing, intensity, and pitch; pseudo-syllable durations; and intonation patterns. The paper provides detailed information on how this is achieved. As an example application of /nailon/, we demonstrate how it is used to improve the efficiency of identifying relevant places at which a machine can legitimately begin to talk to a human interlocutor, as well as to shorten system response times. Index Terms: automatic extraction of prosodic features, dialogue systems, interaction control

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