Hesitations in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Betz S. Hesitations in Spoken Dialogue Systems. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2020

Methods and Terminology for Phonetic Aspects of Incremental Disfluency Synthesis (Poster)

Betz S. Methods and Terminology for Phonetic Aspects of Incremental Disfluency Synthesis (Poster). Presented at the Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum 11, Marburg (Lahn)

Fill the silence! Basics for modeling hesitation

Betz S, Kosmala L. Fill the silence! Basics for modeling hesitation. In: Rose RL, Eklund R, eds. Proceedings of DiSS 2019. The 9th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech. Budapest: ELTE Faculty of Humanities; 2019: 11-14

Disfluencies in German adult- and infant-directed speech

Bellinghausen C, Betz S, Zahner K, Sasdrich A, Schröer M, Schröder B. Disfluencies in German adult- and infant-directed speech. In: Proceedings of SEFOS: 1st International Seminar on the Foundations of Speech. Breathing, Pausing and The Voice. 2019: 44-46

Micro-Structure of Disfluencies: Basics for Conversational Speech Synthesis

Betz S, Wagner P, Schlangen D. Micro-Structure of Disfluencies: Basics for Conversational Speech Synthesis. In: Interspeech 2015. 2015: 2222-2226

Modular Synthesis of Disfluencies for Conversational Speech Systems

Betz S, Wagner P, Schlangen D. Modular Synthesis of Disfluencies for Conversational Speech Systems. Presented at the ESSV 2015, Eichstätt.It has been shown that dialogue systems benefit from incremental architectures to produce fast responses and to interact with the interlocutor in a more human-like way. The advantage of quick responses yields the disadvantage of running out of things to say for a while. In such occasions, humans tend to produce disfluencies as a listener-oriented strategy to signal the ongoing production process and to buy time for finalizing the turn. Introducing disfluency capabilities into a speech synthesis module of a dialogue system may therefore be a straightforward strategy towards conversational speech systems. Disfluencies are a very complex matter, they can take various chaining and nested forms in human communication. We do not attempt to equip our system with the full range of possible disfluent time-buying strategies found in human interaction. For a first perceptual evaluation of the most suitable synthetic disfluency strategy to be integrated into the dialogue system, we focus on three structural factors that are able to cover a wide range of attested disfluency patterns: lengthening, word cutoffs and pauses. This leads to several different configurations a disfluent sentence can take. Sentences from a spontaneous speech corpus were resynthesized in all possible configurations using Mary TTS. In order to identify euphone configurations, these stimuli were then presented to test subjects in a perception test