Voice quality and speaking rate in Icelandic rhetorical questions

Modeling speaking rate for voice fonts

Voice fonts are created and stored for a speaker, to be used to synthesize speech in the speaker’s voice. The most important descriptors of voice fonts are spectral envelope for acoustic units and prosodic features such as fundamental frequency and average speaking rate. In this paper, we present a new approach to model the speaking rate so that it can be easily incorporated in voice fonts and ...

Automatic Identification of Rhetorical Questions

A question may be asked not only to elicit information, but also to make a statement. Questions serving the latter purpose, called rhetorical questions, are often lexically and syntactically indistinguishable from other types of questions. Still, it is desirable to be able to identify rhetorical questions, as it is relevant for many NLP tasks, including information extraction and text summariza...

Intentions, Information, And Inference: Two Rhetorical Questions

Identifying Rhetorical Questions in Social Media

Social media provides a platform for seeking information from a large user base. Information seeking in social media, however, occurs simultaneously with users expressing their viewpoints by making statements. Rhetorical questions have the form of a question but serve the function of a statement and might mislead platforms assisting information seeking in social media. It becomes difficult to i...

The rhetorical attachment of questions and answers

Placing ourselves within the tradition of dynamic semantic approaches to discourse in natural language Kamp and Reyle (1993), Groenendjik and Stokhof (1991), we investigate here how some of the principles underlying these approaches can be extended to the study of human dialogue, taking over some hypotheses of Asher and Lascarides (1998, 2003). In this perspective, a dialogue is made of segment...