Functions of silences towards information flow in spoken conversation

Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Evgeny A. Stepanov, Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Silence is an integral part of the most frequent turn-taking phenomena in spoken conversations. Silence is sized and placed within the conversation flow and it is coordinated by the speakers along with the other speech acts. The objective of this analytical study is twofold: To explore the functions of silence with duration of one second and above, towards information flow in a dyadic conversation utilizing the sequences of dialog acts present in the turns surrounding the silence itself; and to design a feature space useful for clustering the silences using a hierarchical concept formation algorithm. The resulting clusters are manually grouped into functional categories based on their similarities. It is observed that the silence plays an important role in response preparation, also can indicate speakers' hesitation or indecisiveness. It is also observed that sometimes long silences can be used deliberately to get a forced response from another speaker thus making silence a multi-functional and an important catalyst towards information flow.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2017 - 1st Workshop on Speech-Centric Natural Language Processing, SCNLP 2017 - Proceedings of the Workshop
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1-9
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626920
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event1st Workshop on Speech-Centric Natural Language Processing, SCNLP 2017, held in conjunction with the Conference on - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: 7 Sept 2017 → …

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2017 - 1st Workshop on Speech-Centric Natural Language Processing, SCNLP 2017 - Proceedings of the Workshop

Conference

Conference1st Workshop on Speech-Centric Natural Language Processing, SCNLP 2017, held in conjunction with the Conference on
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period7/09/17 → …

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