Comparing phrase-final patterns across speech styles and groups in European Portuguese

Le présent travail se propose d’étudier les effets phonétiquesphonologiques et les types de tons présents à la frontière d’unités intonatives majeures et mineures (indices de rupture 4 et 3 du système ToBI), en comparant la parole spontanée et la parole préparée (non lue) produites par des adolescents et par des adultes à l’école. Le corpus analysé est constitué d’un relevé de 1041 unités intonatives extraites de 18 présentations orales faites par 6 élèves (14-15 ans) et 3 professeurs (un sous-ensemble du corpus CPE-FACES). Les résultats montrent que les indices phonétiques et prosodiques en fin d’unités intonatives varient en fonction (i) du style de parole et (ii) de l’âge/statut des locuteurs

Entanglement-screening by nonlinear resonances

We show that nonlinear resonances in a classically mixed phase space allow to define generic, strongly entangled multi-partite quantum states. The robustness of their multipartite entanglement increases with the particle number, i.e. in the semiclassical limit, for those classes of diffusive noise which assist the quantum-classical transition

Prosodic, syntactic, semantic guidelines for topic structures across domains and corpora

This paper presents the annotation guidelines applied to naturally occurring speech, aiming at an integrated account of contrast and parallel structures in European Portuguese. These guidelines were defined to allow for the empirical study of interactions among intonation and syntax-discourse patterns in selected sets of different corpora (monologues and dialogues, by adults and teenagers). In this paper we focus on the multilayer annotation process of left periphery structures by using a small sample of highly spontaneous speech in which the distinct types of topic structures are displayed. The analysis of this sample provides fundamental training and testing material for further application in a wider range of domains and corpora. The annotation process comprises the following time-linked levels (manual and automatic): phone, syllable and word level transcriptions (including co-articulation effects); tonal events and break levels; part-of-speech tagging; syntactic-discourse patterns (construction type; construction position; syntactic function; discourse function), and disfluency events as well. Speech corpora with such a multi-level annotation are a valuable resource to look into grammar module relations in language use from an integrated viewpoint. Such viewpoint is innovative in our language, and has not been often assumed by studies for other languages.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Affective analysis of customer service calls

This paper presents an affective and acoustic-prosodic analysis of a call-center corpus (700 phone calls with corresponding customer satisfaction levels). Our main goal is to understand how customers’ satisfaction correlates to the acoustic-prosodic and affective information (emotions and personality traits) of the interactions. A subset of 30 calls was manually annotated with emotions (frustrated vs.neutral) and personality traits (Big-Five model). Results on automatic satisfaction prediction from acoustic-prosodic features show a number of very informative linguistic knowledge-based features, especially pitch and energy ranges. The affective analysis also provides encouraging results, relating low/high satisfaction levels with the presence/absence of customer frustration. Concerning personality, customers tend to express signs of anxiety and nervousness, while agents are generally perceived as extroverted and open.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Adaptação acústico-prosódica local em Português Europeu

This paper presents an acoustic-prosodic analysis of entrainment in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese. Our main goal is to analyze how turn-by-turn entrainment varies with distinct structural metadata events: types of sentence-like units (SUs) in consecutive turns (e.g. interrogatives followed by declaratives, or both declaratives), and with the presence of discourse markers, affirmative cue words, and disfluencies in the beginning of turns. Results show that entrainment at turn-exchanges occurs in terms of pitch, energy, duration, and voice quality. Considering SUs types, question-answer pairs are the ones with stronger similarity, as declarative-interrogative turns are the ones where less entrainment occurs. Moreover, in question-answer pairs, Yes/No and Tag questions present stronger evidences of entrainment than Wh- questions. Regarding turn-initial structures, there are evidences of (i) stronger entrainment when the second turn begins with an affirmative cue word, (ii) less strong with ambiguous structures (such as ‘OK’), emphatic affirmative answers, and negative cue words; (iii) and scarce with disfluencies and discourse markers. Different degrees of local entrainment may be related to the informative structure of distinct structural metadata events.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Programa computacional de simulação da produtividade para suporte a decisão no plantio de milho.

O objetivo deste trabalho foi desenvolver um programa computacional que simule a produção do milho, sendo utilizado como um suporte a decisão para o produtor. O algoritmo utilizado consta de modelos de regressão obtidos a partir de resultados de uma pesquisa de campo realizada na Embrapa Milho e Sorgo, sob condições de plantio direto e com modelos de estimativas de produção obtidos em tabelas e resultados de outros trabalhos constantes na literatura. O pacote computacional resultante é completo o suficiente para a simulação da produtividade em um determinado solo e implantação e uso por produtores (usuários) como uma ferramenta de Agricultura de Precisão, capaz de auxiliar à tomada de decisão. O programa é de fácil manuseio, onde o usuário pode optar em digitar os valores que representam as condições do solo de plantio, ou resgatar valores de um banco de dados histórico que pode ser implementado pelo próprio usuário, ou obtido através da Embrapa que disponibilizará, através da rede mundial de computadores, condições de solo de todo o país. A saída do programa é de simples interpretação e fornece, entre outros resultados, a produtividade máxima de um solo sob as condições de simulação, auxiliando o produtor na tomada de decisão quanto a aplicação de insumos