Fill the silence! Basics for modeling hesitation
Megjelenés dátuma: 2019
Abstract:
In order to model hesitations for technical applications such as conversational speech
synthesis, it is desirable to understand interactions between individual hesitation markers.
In this study, we explore two markers that have been subject to many discussions: silences
and fillers. While it is generally acknowledged that fillers occur in two distinct forms, um
and uh, it is not agreed on whether these forms systematically influence the length of
associated silences. This notion will be investigated on a small dataset of English
spontaneous speech data, and the measure of distance between filler and silence will be
introduced to the analyses. Results suggest that filler type influences associated silence
duration systematically and that silences tend to gravitate towards fillers in utterances,
exhibiting systematically lower duration when preceding them. These results provide
valuable insights for improving existing hesitation models.