ISCA Archive ICSLP 1996
ISCA Archive ICSLP 1996

Segmentation of spoken dialogue by interjections, disfluent utterances and pauses

Kazuyuki Takagi, Shuichi Itahashi

This paper attempts to segment spontaneous speech of human-to-human spoken dialogues into a relatively large unit of speech, that is, a sub-phrasal unit segmented by interjections, disfluent utterances and pauses. A spontaneous speech model incorporating prosody was developed, in which three kinds of speech segment models and the transition probabilities among them were specified. The segmentation experiments showed that 87.6 % of the segment boundaries were located correctly within 50 msec, 81.2 % within 30 msec, which showed 10.1 point increase in performance comparing with the initial model without prosodic information.