Speech Production in Human-Machine Dialogue: A Natural Language Generation Perspective

This article discusses speech production in dialogue from the perspective of natural language generation focusing on the selec tion of appropriate intonation We argue that in order to assign ap propriate intonation contours in speech producing systems it is vital to acknowledge the diversity of functions that intonation ful lls and to account for communicative and immediate contexts as major factors constraining intonation selection Bringing forward arguments from a functional linguistically motivated natural language generation architec ture we present a model of context to speech as an alternative to the traditional text to speech and concept to speech approaches