Automatic classification of question turns in spontaneous speech using lexical and prosodic evidence

The ability to identify speech acts reliably is desirable in any spoken language system that interacts with humans. Minimally, such a system should be capable of distinguishing between question-bearing turns and other types of utterances. However, this is a non-trivial task, since spontaneous speech tends to have incomplete syntactic, and even ungrammatical, structure and is characterized by disfluencies, repairs and other non-linguistic vocalizations that make simple rule based pattern learning difficult. In this paper, we present a system for identifying question-bearing turns in spontaneous multi-party speech (ICSI Meeting Corpus) using lexical and prosodic evidence. On a balanced test set, our sys

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Sankaranarayanan Ananthakrishnan, Prasanta Ghosh, Shrikanth Narayanan
• Keywords: ICASSP 2008, Question-bearing Turns, Signal Processing, Speech Acts, Spontaneous Multi-party Speech