Real-time Filled Pause Detection for Spontaneous Speech Dialogue

Filled Pause Display

This project is proposed and researched by Masataka Goto and Katunobu Itou.

Japanese version is here.
Japanese version

We have developed a method for automatically detecting filled (vocalized) pauses, which are one of the hesitation phenomena that current speech recognizers typically cannot handle. The detection of these pauses is important in spontaneous speech dialogue systems because they play valuable roles, such as helping a speaker keep a conversational turn, in oral communication. Although a few speech recognition systems have processed filled pauses within subword-based connected word recognition or word-spotting frameworks, they did not detect the pauses individually and consequently could not consider their roles. We propose a method that detects filled pauses and word lengthening on the basis of small fundamental frequency transition and small spectral envelope deformation under the assumption that speakers do not change articulator parameters during filled pauses. Experimental results for a Japanese spoken dialogue corpus show that our real-time filled-pause-detection system yielded good recall and precision rates.

References:

  1. Masataka Goto, Katunobu Itou, and Satoru Hayamizu: A Real-time System Detecting Filled Pauses in Spontaneous Speech, The Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers D-II, Vol.J83-D-II, No.11, pp.2330-2340, November 2000. (in Japanese)
  2. Masataka Goto, Katunobu Itou, and Satoru Hayamizu: Evaluation of a Real-time Filled Pause Detection System, The 2000 Spring Meeting of The Acoustical Society of Japan, 3-8-8, pp.81-82, March 2000. (in Japanese)
  3. Masataka Goto, Katunobu Itou, and Satoru Hayamizu: A Real-time Filled Pause Detection System: Toward Spontaneous Speech Dialogue, 2000 RWC Symposium Proceedings (RWC Technical Report), TR-99-002, pp.187-192, January 2000.
  4. Masataka Goto, Katunobu Itou, and Satoru Hayamizu: Real-time Detection of Filled Pauses in Spontaneous Speech, The 1999 Autumn Meeting of The Acoustical Society of Japan, 3-1-5, pp.105-106, October 1999. (in Japanese)
    PDF
  5. Masataka Goto, Katunobu Itou, and Satoru Hayamizu: A Real-time Filled Pause Detection System for Spontaneous Speech Recognition, Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech '99), pp.227-230, September 1999.
    PDF
  6. Masataka Goto, Katunobu Itou, and Satoru Hayamizu: A Real-time System Detecting Filled Pauses in Spontaneous Speech, Information Processing Society of Japan SIG Notes, 99-SLP-27-2, Vol.99, No.64, July 1999. (in Japanese)
    PDF

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Please E-mail comments and questions to
Masataka GOTO <m.goto [at] aist.go.jp>

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last update: May 11, 2000