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Results
• Clear distinction between two question intonations: perception and understanding level
• Three distinct prototypes for different interpretations
Future work
• Will be implemented and tested in Higgins to evaluate user responses and dialogue efficiency
• Corpus study of human-human dialog• Multi-syllable, multi-word, accent II• Back-channels (hmm, eh)• Multimodal synthesis
early
mid late
Number of votes
A CCEPT C LARIFY U NDERSTANDING
C LARIFY P ERCEPTION
0
10
20
30
40
early
late
HIGH
LOW
mid
(max 48)
The Effects of Prosodic Features on the Interpretation of Clarification Ellipses
Jens Edlund, David House and Gabriel Skantze
AbstractIn this paper, the effects of prosodic features on the interpretation of elliptical clarification requests in dialogue are studied. An experiment is presented where subjects were asked to listen to short human-computer dialogue fragments in Swedish, where a synthetic voice was making an elliptical clarification after a user turn. The prosodic features of the synthetic voice were systematically varied, and the subjects were asked to judge what was actually intended by the computer. The results show that an early low F0 peak signals acceptance, that a late high peak is perceived as a request for clarification of what was said, and that a mid high peak is perceived as a request for clarification of the meaning of what was said.
Setting Levels of understanding
Allwood et al. (1992), Clark (1996)
Ellipsis interpretation
Centre forSpeech Technology
TT
Errors and clarification in dialog
• Dialog not always error free• Error detection often made using explicit or implicit
spoken clarification/verification:
User […] on the right I see a red building.System (low conf.) Did you say ’A red building’?System (high conf.) A red building… ok, take a left […]?
Traditionally:
Clarification Ellipses
User […] on the right I see a red building.System red(?)
Advantages:
Level
Acceptance H accepts what S says
Understanding H understands what S says
Perception H hears what S says
Contact H hears that S speaks
Experiment
• 8 subjects judged the meaning of one-word elliptical clarification requests in dialogue context
• Task: Select paraphrase for elliptical system utterance
• Swedish
• System utterance: red, blue, yellow• F0 peak position: early, mid, late• F0 peak height: low, high• Vowel duration: normal, long
= 36 stimuli
• LUKAS diphone MBROLA synthesis
Level Paraphrase
Signal Acceptance Ok, red.
Clarify Understanding Do you really mean red?
Clarify Perception Did you say red?
The Higgins spoken dialog system forpedestrian navigation
No effects for:• Subject• Color• Duration
Prototypes:• Accept:
Early low peak• Clarify Understanding:
Mid high peak• Clarify Perception:
Late high peak
The Problem
• Elliptical one-word clarification requests are potentially ambiguous
• Little syntax and structure • Prosody more critical• How do prosodic features affect the
interpretation of these utterances?
• Constructed as full propositions• Often perceived as tedious• Clarifies entire user utterances
• Fast• Focuses on problematic fragment• Often used in human-human dialog
Question intonation
Swedish question intonation • Raised top-line and widened F0 range on focal
accent (Gårding, 1998)• Delayed focal peak (House, 2003)
German dialog • Rodriguez & Schlangen (2004)• Rising boundary tones to clarify acoustic
problems (perception) • Used less for reference resolution
(understanding)
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