A large proportion of online consumers tend to abandon their virtual shopping carts instead of finalizing their purchases. In this research in progress paper, we investigate how online shopping hesitation can be alleviated to promote product sales in the context of social shopping. Particularly, we attempt to address the research gap by exploring how online review characteristics (i.e., review ...

This paper describes our research on speech interfaces using nonverbal speech information. Although speech information consists of verbal and nonverbal information, most speechrecognition research has made use of only verbal information such as words and sentences. From among nonverbal information, we have focused on hesitation (filled pause) and prosody (voice pitch) to create four speech-inte...

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22, 201–211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared flu...

A dedicated resource, consisting of annotated speech data, tools, and workflow design, was developed for the detailed investigation of discourse phenomena in Taiwan Mandarin. The discourse phenomena have functions which are associated with positions in utterances, and temporal properties, and include discourse markers (‘NAGE’, ’NA’, e.g. ‘hesitation’, ‘utterance initiation’), discourse particle...

This paper looks at both the prepayment risks of housing mortgage loan credit default swaps (LCDS) as well as the fuzziness and hesitation of investors as regards prepayments by borrowers. It further discusses the first default pricing of a basket of LCDS in a fuzzy environment by using stochastic analysis and triangular intuition-based fuzzy set theory. Through the 'fuzzification' of the sensi...

Agents are being recommended as a next generation model for revising and restructuring the complex distributed applications. So the task of engineering quality for agent systems has also become significant. As different stakeholders such as project managers, users, and practitioners have different interpretations of quality; an integrated specification of MAS quality that could satisfy all the ...

Although category ratings are ubiquitous in psychology, we do not have ample knowledge about the rating decision process per se. In this experimental study, subjects were asked to make 5category ratings for sentences presented on a PC screen using a PC mouse with the cursor trajectories recorded. The stimulus sentences were general questions about math, geography, ways of life, and opinion (e.g...

With this paper we present a European Portuguese database of hesitations in speech. Under the name of HESITA, this database contains annotations of hesitation events, such as filled pauses, vocalic extensions, truncated words, repetitions and substitutions. The hesitations were found over 30 daily news programs collected from podcasts of a Portuguese television channel. The database also includ...