ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999

Prosodic correlates of information structure in Swedish human-human dialogues

Merle Horne, Petra Hansson, Gösta Bruce, Johan Frid

Investigation of travel agent (~System) Task-related utterances reveals intonational contours where focal accents occur on information given previously in the dialogue by the client (~User). The accentuation can be related to the interactive nature of dialogue where the information holder picks up on a Task-related topic introduced by the client and comments on it in an engaged manner.

Keywords: prosody, accentuation, information structure, dialogue, speech synthesis, Given-New