Marcus Filipsson

Cue words and the topic structure of spoken discourse: The case of Swedish men 'but'

The Swedish cue word men ‘but’ can mark the boundary between both different topic units as well as topic-internal units in spontaneous speech. The goal of this study is to see if these two functions of men can be distinguished on the basis of their local prosodic correlates and co-occurring lexical items. Men-tokens in spontaneous narrations were labelled as to their function, first using text-only data. The ‘strong’ tokens (categorized identically by all labellers) were subsequently seen to be clearly differentiated into two classes on the basis of related prosodic parameters and co-occurring lexical items. This distinction was, however, not found for the corresponding ‘weak’ tokens which were subsequently relabelled using both text and speech nor for the data-base as a whole. A test using a neural network trained using strong tokens was seen to be able to correctly categorize 90% of the strong men-tokens as to their associated boundary-type (topic-shift vs. topic-internal). The results show that cue words along with their prosodic correlates and co-occurring lexical items constitute a constellation of important information for understanding how segmentation of spoken discourse is produced and understood.

Modelling of Swedish text and discourse intonation in a speech synthesis framework

In this chapter, we present a model for the analysis and synthesis of intonation in spontaneous conversations in Swedish. The model is an enhanced version of the model developed in (1977) and implemented in our text-to-speech synthesis. In our recent work we have developed the model from the perspective of discourse and multi-sentence texts. This takes us out of the restricted one-sentence/utterance analysis and synthesis into the living world of prosody in communication.

Computational Extraction of Lexico-Grammatical Information for Generation of Swedish Intonation

By using a minimal amount of syntactic information in combination with information on lexical word class and morphological and lexico-semantic coreferential (identity of sense) relations, it is possible to generate an appropriate prosodic structure for Swedish texts. The structure of the algorithms involved in the prosodic preprocessing are presented. These include a referent tracker, a word-class tagger, a complex-word identifier, a clause boundary identifier, and a prosodic constituent parser.

Developing the modelling of Swedish prosody in spontaneous dialogue

The main goal of our current research is the development of the Swedish prosody model. In our analysis of discourse and dialogue intonation, we are exploiting model-based resynthesis. By comparing synthesized default and fine-tuned pitch contours for the dialogues under study, we are able to isolate relevant intonation patterns. This analysis of intonation is related to an independent modelling of topic structure consisting of lexical-semantic analysis and text segmentation. Some results from our model-based acoustic analysis are presented, and its implementation in text-to-speech-synthesis is discussed.