Fillers in Spoken Language Understanding: Computational and Psycholinguistic Perspectives

Disfluencies (i.e. interruptions in the regular flow of speech), are ubiquitous to spoken discourse. Fillers ("uh", "um") are disfluencies that occur the most frequently compared to other kinds of disfluencies. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, there isn't a resource that brings together the research perspectives influencing Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) on these speech events. This aim of this article is to synthesise a breadth of perspectives in a holistic way; i.e. from considering underlying (psycho)linguistic theory, to their annotation and consideration in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and SLU systems, to lastly, their study from a generation standpoint. This article aims to present the perspectives in an approachable way to the SLU and Conversational AI community, and discuss moving forward, what we believe are the trends and challenges in each area.Comment: To appear in TAL Journa

Automatic rich annotation of large corpus of conversational transcribed speech

International audienceThis paper describes the use of the CasSys platform in order to achieve the chunking of conversational speech transcripts by means of cascades of Unitex transducers. Our system is involved in the EPAC project of the French National agency of Research (ANR). The aim of this project is to develop robust methods for the annotation of audio/multimedia document collections which contains conversational speech sequences such as TV or radio programs. At first, this paper presents the EPAC project and the adaptation of a former chunking system (Romus) which was developed in the restricted framework of dedicated spoken man-machine dialogue. Then, it describes the problems that are arising due to 1) spontaneous speech disfluencies and 2) errors for the previous stages of processing (automatic speech recognition and POS tagging)

Parsing Manually Detected andNnormalized Disfluencies in Spoken Estonian

Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007. Editors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit. University of Tartu, Tartu, 2007. ISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online) ISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM) pp. 363-366

Depends on what the French say: Spoken corpus annotation with and beyond syntactic function

International audienceWe present a syntactic annotation scheme for spoken French that is currently used in the Rhapsodie project. This annotation is dependency- based and includes coordination and disfluency as analogously encoded types of paradigmatic phenomena. Furthermore, we attempt a thorough definition of the discourse units required by the systematic annotation of other phenomena beyond usual sentence boundaries, which are typical for spoken language. This includes so called "macrosyntactic" phenomena such as dislocation, parataxis, insertions, grafts, and epexegesis

Speaking in piles: Paradigmatic annotation of French spoken corpus

International audienceThis article describes a central part of the syntactic schemes that are currently used in the ongoing annotation of a French spoken corpus. Based on the Aix School grid analysis of spoken French, the notion of « pile » is introduced, allowing for an elegant description of various paradigmatic phenomena like disfluency, reformulation, apposition, instanciation, including question-answering and colon effect, and different types of coordination. Piles naturally complete dependency annotations by modeling non-functional relations between phrases

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Editors: Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep and Marco Passarotti. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 9 (2010), 268 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15891