Recent spoken dialog systems are moving away from command and control towards a more intuitive and natural style of interaction. In order to choose an appropriate system design which allows the system to deal with naturally spoken user input, a definition of what exactly constitutes naturalness in user input is important. In this paper, we examine how different user groups naturally speak to an...

The present study aims to isolate the locus of the frequency effect within the spoken word recognition architecture. By applying the additive factors logic (Sternberg, 1969) to an auditory lexical decision task where both word frequency and stimulus quality were factorially manipulated, the reaction time data can be analyzed to study processing stages along the time course of spoken word recogn...

This paper details a software architecture for discourse processing in spoken dialogue systems, where the three component tasks of discourse processing are (1) Dialogue Management, (2) Context Tracking, and (3) Pragmatic Adaptation. We define these three component tasks and describe their roles in a complex, near-future scenario in which multiple humans interact with each other and with compute...

In this paper we discuss French prosody in the light of language contact. Data of three contact varieties of French are compared with two varieties spoken in monolingual contexts. The data are semi-automatically processed, and three prosodic features are analyzed: metrical weight of the Accentual Phrases (AP), respect of AP formation constraints, and realizations of sandhi phenomena. Rhythmic c...

This paper presents the results of a first acoustic phonetic investigation into voiceless spirantization in the variety of Tuscan Italian spoken in Siena. Based on spontaneous speech data (6 speakers), we focus upon occurrences of a phonetic variant, previously referred to as a ‘‘semi-fricative’’. Intermediate between a voiceless stop and a voiceless fricative, it is reported to occur in Pisan ...

Spoken Dialogue Systems are man-machine interfaces which use speech as the medium of interaction. In recent years, dialogue optimization using reinforcement learning has evolved to be a state of the art technique. The primary focus of research in the dialogue domain is to learn some optimal policy with regard to the task description (reward function) and the user simulation being employed. Howe...

This paper presents a corpus study that investigates the question of word order variations (WOV) in spontaneous spoken French and its consequences on the parsing techniques that are used in Natural Language Processing. We have studied four taskoriented spoken dialogue corpora which concern different application tasks (air transport or tourism information, switchboard calls). Two corpora concern...

The directional response and roll stability characteristics of a partly filled tractor semi-trailer vehicle, with cylindrical tank, are investigated in various maneuvers. The dynamic interaction of liquid cargo with the tractor semi-trailer vehicle is also evaluated by integrating a dynamic slosh model of the partly filled tank with five-degrees-of-freedom of a tractor semi-trailer tank mode...

The present study investigates speech segmentation of English by semi-bilingual Japanese speakers of English. Two experiments were conducted with forty subjects. The first experiment used a syllable-monitoring task and the results did not show a moraic segmentation strategy, which is a languagespecific segmentation strategy for native speakers of Japanese. This suggests that they employed a gen...