Prosodic cues of spontaneous speech in French

Disfluencies, when present in speech signal, can make syntactic parsing difficult. This difficulty is increased when machines are involved in communication and when speech devices rely on automatic speech recognition techniques. In order to improve automatic speech parsing and thus speech comprehension, methods have been proposed to filter disfluencies out from the speech signal. Attempts have been made to use prosodic parameters to improve such a filtering. However, before introducing prosodic parameters into automatic speech recognition processes, it would be useful to investigate whether disfluencies can be characterized in a prosodic way and whether their prosodic cues would be representative enough to be used in automatic systems. The aim of this study was to examine to which extent prosodic parameters would be able to characterize disfluencies in French. Word repetitions, filled and silent pauses and speech repairs were described in a prosodic way using statistical analyses of their prosodic parameters. These analyses allowed simple prosodic rules to be formulated. The efficiency of the prosodic rules was evaluated on the task of filled pauses, word repetitions and hesitation detections.