Utterance segmentation and turn-taking in spoken dialogue systems
Jens Edlund, Mattias Heldner, Joakim Gustafson · 2005
A widely used method for finding places to take turn in spoken dialogue systems is to assume that an utterance ends where the user ceases to speak. Such endpoint detection normally triggers on a certain amount of silence, or non-speech. However, spontaneous speech frequently contains silent pauses inside sentencelike units, for example when the speaker hesitates. This paper presents /nailon/, an on-line, real-time prosodic analysis tool, and a number of experiments in which end-point detection has been augmented with prosodic analysis in order to segment the speech signal into what humans intuitively perceive as utterance-like units.