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

Acoustic-prosodic entrainment in structural metadata events

This paper presents an acoustic-prosodic analysis of entrain- ment in a Portuguese map-task corpus. Our aim is to ana- lyze how turn-by-turn entrainment varies with distinct structural metadata events: types of sentence-like units (SU) in consecu- tive turns (e.g. interrogatives followed by declaratives, or both declaratives), and with the presence of discourse markers, affir- mative cue words, and disfluencies in the beginning of turns. Entrainment at turn-exchanges may be observed in terms of pitch, energy, duration, and voice quality. Regarding SU types, question-answer turns are the ones with stronger similarity, and declarative-interrogative pairs are the ones where less entrain- ment occurs, as expected. Moreover, in question-answer pairs, there is also stronger evidence of entrainment with Yes/No and Tag questions than with Wh- questions. In fact, these subtypes are coded in distinctive prosodic ways (moreover, the first sub- type has no associated lexical-syntactic cues in Portuguese, only prosodic). As for turn-initial structures, entrainment is stronger when the second turn begins with an affirmative cue word; less strong with ambiguous structures (such as ‘OK’), emphatic af- firmative answers, and negative answers; and scarce with dis- fluencies and discourse markers. The different degrees of local entrainment may be related with the informative structure of distinct structural metadata events.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Extending automatic transcripts in a unified data representation towards a prosodic-based metadata annotation and evaluation

This paper describes a framework that extends automatic speech transcripts in order to accommodate relevant information coming from manual transcripts, the speech signal itself, and other resources, like lexica. The proposed framework automatically collects, relates, computes, and stores all relevant information together in a self-contained data source, making it possible to easily provide a wide range of interconnected information suitable for speech analysis, training, and evaluating a number of automatic speech processing tasks. The main goal of this framework is to integrate different linguistic and paralinguistic layers of knowledge for a more complete view of their representation and interactions in several domains and languages. The processing chain is composed of two main stages, where the first consists of integrating the relevant manual annotations in the speech recognition data, and the second consists of further enriching the previous output in order to accommodate prosodic information. The described framework has been used for the identification and analysis of structural metadata in automatic speech transcripts. Initially put to use for automatic detection of punctuation marks and for capitalization recovery from speech data, it has also been recently used for studying the characterization of disfluencies in speech. It was already applied to several domains of Portuguese corpora, and also to English and Spanish Broadcast News corpora

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

Cross-domain analysis of discourse markers in European Portuguese

This paper presents an analysis of discourse markers in two spontaneous speech corpora for European Portuguese - university lectures and map-task dialogues - and also in a collection of tweets, aiming at contributing to their categorization, scarcely existent for European Portuguese. Our results show that the selection of discourse markers is domain and speaker dependent. We also found that the most frequent discourse markers are similar in all three corpora, despite tweets containing discourse markers not found in the other two corpora. In this multidisciplinary study, comprising both a linguistic perspective and a computational approach, discourse markers are also automatically discriminated from other structural metadata events, namely sentence-like units and disfluencies. Our results show that discourse markers and disfluencies tend to co-occur in the dialogue corpus, but have a complementary distribution in the university lectures. We used three acoustic-prosodic feature sets and machine learning to automatically distinguish between discourse markers, disfluencies and sentence-like units. Our in-domain experiments achieved an accuracy of about 87% in university lectures and 84% in dialogues, in line with our previous results. The eGeMAPS features, commonly used for other paralinguistic tasks, achieved a considerable performance on our data, especially considering the small size of the feature set. Our results suggest that turn-initial discourse markers are usually easier to classify than disfluencies, a result also previously reported in the literature. We conducted a cross-domain evaluation in order to evaluate the robustness of the models across domains. The results achieved are about 11%-12% lower, but we conclude that data from one domain can still be used to classify the same events in the other. Overall, despite the complexity of this task, these are very encouraging state-of-the-art results. Ultimately, using exclusively acoustic-prosodic cues, discourse markers can be fairly discriminated from disfluencies and SUs. In order to better understand the contribution of each feature, we have also reported the impact of the features in both the dialogues and the university lectures. Pitch features are the most relevant ones for the distinction between discourse markers and disfluencies, namely pitch slopes. These features are in line with the wide pitch range of discourse markers, in a continuum from a very compressed pitch range to a very wide one, expressed by total deaccented material or H+L* L* contours, with upstep H tones.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

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

Phase space contraction and quantum operations

We give a criterion to differentiate between dissipative and diffusive quantum operations. It is based on the classical idea that dissipative processes contract volumes in phase space. We define a quantity that can be regarded as ``quantum phase space contraction rate'' and which is related to a fundamental property of quantum channels: non-unitality. We relate it to other properties of the channel and also show a simple example of dissipative noise composed with a chaotic map. The emergence of attaractor-like structures is displayed.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Changes added according to refferee sugestions. (To appear in PRA

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

Adaptação acústico-prosódica entre falantes

This paper presents a global analysis of entrainment in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese, including 48 dialogues, between 24 speakers. Our main goal is to analyze the acoustic-prosodic similarities between speaker pairs, namely if there are global entrainment cues displayed in the dialogues, if entrainment is manifested in distinct sets of features shared amongst the speakers, if entrainment depends on the gender and role of the speaker (giver or follower), and if speakers tend to entrain more with specific interlocutors regardless of the role. Results show that globally speakers tend to be more similar to their partners than to their own speech in the majority of the analyzed features, a strong evidence for entrainment. Moreover, almost all the pairs of speakers display cues of global entrainment, even though in different degrees (speakers entrain but in distinct features). Additionally, the role and gender effects tend to be less striking than the specific interlocutor effect. Our results support the fact that all prosodic parameters are monitored by the speakers in our corpus, contrarily to studies for other languages, which indicate that the main cues are energy related.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio