Date of Award
2009-01-01
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Computational Science
Advisor(s)
Nigel G. Ward
Abstract
Spoken dialog systems today do not vary the prosody of their utterances, although prosody is known to have many useful expressive functions. In a corpus of memory quizzes, I identified eleven dimensions of prosodic variation, each with its own expressive function. I identified the situations in which each was used, and how to detect these situations from the dialog context and the prosody of the interlocutor's previous utterance. I implemented the resulting response rules and had 21 users interact with two versions of the system. Overall they preferred the version in which the prosodic forms of the acknowledgments were chosen to be suitable for each specific context. This suggests that simple adjustments to system prosody based on local context can have value to users.
Language
en
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
Copyright Date
2009
File Size
45 pages
File Format
application/pdf
Rights Holder
Rafael Escalante-Ruiz
Recommended Citation
Escalante-Ruiz, Rafael, "Appropriate Prosodic Variation is Valued by Users" (2009). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 249.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/open_etd/249