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Detecting Uncertainty in Spoken Dialogues: An Exploratory Research for the Automatic Detection of Speaker Uncertainty by Using Prosodic Markers

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Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 45))

Abstract

This paper reports results in automatic detection of speaker uncertainty in spoken dialogues by using prosodic markers. For this purpose a substantial part of the AMI corpus (a multi-modal multi-party meeting corpus) has been selected and converted to a suitable format so its data could be analyzed for a selected set of prosodic features. In the absence of relevant stance annotations on (un)certainty, lexical markers (hedges) have been used to mark utterances as (un)certain. Results show that prosodic features can indeed be used to detect speaker uncertainty in spoken dialogues. The classifiers can tell uncertain from neutral utterances with an accuracy of 75% which is 25% over the baseline.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the European IST Programme Project FP6-033812. This article only reflects the authors’ views and funding agencies are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.

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Correspondence to Dirk Heylen .

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Dral, J., Heylen, D., op den Akker, R. (2011). Detecting Uncertainty in Spoken Dialogues: An Exploratory Research for the Automatic Detection of Speaker Uncertainty by Using Prosodic Markers. In: Ahmad, K. (eds) Affective Computing and Sentiment Analysis. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 45. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1757-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1757-2_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1756-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1757-2

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