Turn-taking and Disfluencies
Julia Hirschberg
CS 6998
7/15/2016
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Today
Turn-taking behaviors
Conversational Analysis
Importance in real systems
Disfluencies
How to model? Detect?
Role in human-human interaction
Importance in real systems?
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Turn-taking
Expected patterns of behavior
Deviation is significant
How do we find the patterns?
Ordinary conversation
Telephone talk
Meetings
Email?
Who looks for these? (Ilana)
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Terminology
Adjacency pairs
Preference
Pre-sequence
Repair
Examples:
Telephone openings, closings
Broadcasts
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Could this be useful when we
build SDS?
What do we expect to hear?
What should we produce?
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Disfluencies and Self-Repairs
Are these just ‘noise’?
For people (Heba)
For parsers
For speech recognizers
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Hindle ’83: Finding the Edit Signal
If we have it, can we ‘repair’ the self-repair
automatically?
Builds a correcting parser, Fidditch, for
spontaneous speech
Given a string with an edit signal marked,
produces a ‘repaired’ version
I was * I am really annoyed
If X1 * X2 are similar linguistic elements
separated by an edit signal, replace X1 w/X2
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What does it mean to be the
same
Same surface string
Well if they’d * if they’d…
Same category
I was just that * the kind of guy…
Same constituent
I think that you get * it’s more strict in Catholic
schools
Restarts are completely different…
I just think * Do you want something to eat?
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Bear et al ’92: Detecting and
Correcting Self-Repairs
Use multiple knowledge sources but not edit
signal
Lexical pattern matching
Parsing failure + pattern matching + reparsing
Acoustic information: pause, peak F0,
Cue words: well, no
Fragments
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But…is there an edit signal?
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Does it identify self-repairs
reliably?
CART prediction: 86% precision, 91%
recall
Duration of interval, presence of
fragment, pause filler, p.o.s., lexical
matching across DI
Are there edit signals?
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Next Week
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