Analysis of the Relationship Between Prosodic Features of Fillers and its Forms or Occurrence Positions

Fillers are involved in the ease of understanding by listeners and turn-taking. However, the knowledge about its prosodic features is insufficient, and its modeling has not been done either. For these reasons, there is insufficient knowledge to generate natural and appropriate fillers in a dialog system at present. Therefore, for the purpose of clarifying the prosodic features of fillers, its relationship with occurrence positions or forms were analyzed in this research. ‘Ano’ and ‘Eto’ were used as forms, non-/boundary of Dialog Act and non-/turntaking for occurrence positions. Duration, F0, and intensity were utilized as prosodic features. As a result, the followings were found out: the prosodic features are different depending on the difference of the occurrence positions even for fillers of the same form, and similar prosodic features are found between the same occurrence positions even in different forms.