In this paper, we present a Conditional Random Field based approach for automatic detection of edit disfluencies in a conversational telephone corpus in French. We define disfluency patterns using both linguistic and acoustic features to perform disfluency detection. Two related tasks are considered : the first task aims at detecting the disfluent speech portion proper or reparandum, i.e. the p...

Conversations provide rich opportunities for interactive, continuous learning. When something goes wrong, a system can ask for clarification, rewording, or otherwise redirect the interaction to achieve its goals. In this paper, we present an approach for using conversational interactions of this type to induce semantic parsers. We demonstrate learning without any explicit annotation of the mean...

Prior research into embodied interface agents has found that users like them and find them engaging. However, results on the effectiveness of these interfaces for task completion have been mixed. In this paper, we argue that embodiment can serve an even stronger function if system designers use actual human conversational protocols in the design of the interface. Communicative behaviors such as...

This paper describes the so-called ill-formed nature of spontaneous conversational speech as observed from the study of a 1500-hour corpus of recorded dialogue speech. We note that the structure is quite different from that of more formal speech or writing and propose a Statistical Machine Translation approach for mapping between the spoken and written forms of the language as if they were two ...