Speech Rate Comparison When Talking to a System and Talking to a Human: A Study from a Speech-to-Speech, Machine Translation Mediated Map Task

This study focuses on the adaptation of subjects in Humanto-Human (H2H) communication in spontaneous dialogues in two different settings. The speech rate of sixteen dialogues from the HCRC Map Task corpus have been analyzed as direct H2H communication, while fifteen dialogues from the ILMT-s2s corpus have been analyzed as a Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation (S2S-MT) mediated H2H communication comparison. The analysis shows that while the mean speech rate of the subjects in the two task oriented corpora differ, in both corpora the role of the subject causes a significant difference in the speech rate with the Information Giver using a slower speech rate than the Information Follower. Also the different settings of the dialogue recordings (with or without eye contact in the HCRC corpus and with or without live video streaming in the ILMTs2s corpus) only show a negligible difference in the speech rate. However, the gender of the subjects have provided an interesting difference with the female subjects of the ILMT-s2s corpus using a slower speech rate than the male subjects, gender does not show any difference in the HCRC corpus. This indicates that the difference is not from performing the map task, but a result of their adaptation strategy to the S2S-MT system.