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INTERSPEECH
2010

Pitch similarity in the vicinity of backchannels

12 years 10 months ago
Pitch similarity in the vicinity of backchannels
Dynamic modeling of spoken dialogue seeks to capture how interlocutors change their speech over the course of a conversation. Much work has focused on how speakers adapt or entrain to different aspects of one another's speaking style. In this paper we focus on local aspects of this adaptation. We investigate the relationship between backchannels and the interlocutor utterances that precede them with respect to pitch. We demonstrate that the pitch of backchannels is more similar to the immediately preceding utterance than nonbackchannels. This inter-speaker pitch relationship captures the same distinctions as more cumbersome intra-speaker relations, and supports the intuition that, in terms of pitch, such similarity may be one of the mechanisms by which backchannels are rendered 'unobtrusive'.
Mattias Heldner, Jens Edlund, Julia Hirschberg
Added 18 May 2011
Updated 18 May 2011
Type Journal
Year 2010
Where INTERSPEECH
Authors Mattias Heldner, Jens Edlund, Julia Hirschberg
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