Peter A. Heeman
Using Acoustic Clues
to Distinguish Speech Repairs
and Intonational Phrase Boundaries
Abstract:In spoken dialogue, hearers can make use of acoustic clues to understand what the speaker
is saying. Previous work has shown their utility in signaling intonational phrase boundaries and
prominence in professionally read speech (Wightman and Campbell, 1994). However, in spoken
dialogue, intonational phrase boundaries and speech repairs seem to share acoustic as well as
lexical clues. So it is necessary to resolve both issues at the same time. In this paper, we extend
the existing approach to account for both intonational phrase boundaries and speech repairs in
spontaneous speech. We also incorporate these clues into a statistical model, based on a part-of-
speech tagger, that takes into account lexical clues.