Speech to personal assistants (e.g., reminders, calendar entries, messaging, voice search) is often uttered under cognitive load, causing nonfinal pausing that can result in premature recognition cut-offs. Prior research suggests that prepausal features can discriminate final from nonfinal pauses, but it does not reveal how speakers would behave if given longer to pause. To this end, we collect...

The suffix ''–some'' is derived from the Greek word ''soma,'' which means body. Molecular biologists use the ''–some'' suffix when naming macromolecular assemblies, such as the ribosome, spliceosome, and exosome, and more recently the metabolosome and periodosome. This issue's Molecular Biology Select discusses reports that highlight the functional and structural intricacies of these systems. R...

We present results of a comparison between two prosody prediction algorithms, showing that the incorporation of information from a parser results in signi cantly improved performance for our text-tospeech synthesiser. We used a stochastic tree-based parser to generate a tagged and bracketed representation of the input text, and then interpreted this higher-level information to produce a ToBI-ty...

Given that state of the art speech synthesis systems have already reached a high naturalness level, it is time to move to talking speech from the actual read speech framework. For this purpose it is thus necessary to investigate how disfluencies can be included in speech synthesis and even increase its naturalness. This paper builds on a previously presented work and focuses on finding a local ...

On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and faceto-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the...