Skip to main content
Log in

Accent Patterning on Domain-Related Information in Swedish Travel Dialogues

  • Published:
International Journal of Speech Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Investigation of travel-domain dialogues reveals travel-agent (≈System) utterances with intonational contours characterized by late-timed focal accents on given information. These accents occur on content words in utterance-initial position. The accentuation can be assumed to be related to the interactive nature of the dialogue in which the travel agent links back to a domain-related concept introduced by the client (≈User) and comments on it in an engaged manner. A perception test using constructed human-machine dialogues in which the machine (synthesized) responses vary as to the type of accent pattern on the initial words was developed to test listeners' preference for accent type. Results indicate that i) focal accents on domain-related utterance-initial given concepts are indeed preferred to nonfocal accents and that ii) late-timed focal accents are preferred to early-timed focal accents. These results have implications for the design of the prosody-generating component of human-machine dialogue systems.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Ahrenberg, L. (1999). Proposal for an extended LINLIN coding scheme (ELIN). ms, Dept. of Computer Science, Linköping University.

  • Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (1992-2000). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Web site: www.praat.org

  • Bruce, G. (1977). Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective. Lund: Gleerups.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bruce, G. (1987). How floating is focal accent? In K. Gregersen and H. Basbøll (Eds.), Nordic Prosody. Odense: Odense University Press, vol. 4, pp. 41-49.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bruce, G., Filipsson, M., Frid, J., Granström, B., Gustafson, K., Horne, M., House, D., Lastow, B., and Touati, P. (1996). Developing the modelling of Swedish prosody in spontaneous dialogue. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 96, pp. 370-373.

  • Clark, H. and Schaefer, E. (1989). Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science, 13: 259-294.

    Google Scholar 

  • D'Imperio, M. and House, D. (1997). Perception of questions and statements in Neapolitan Italian. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, pp. 251-254.

  • Dutoit, T., Pagel, V., Pierret, N., Bataille, F., and van der Wrecken, O. (1996). The MBROLA project: towards a set of high-quality speech synthesizers free of use for non-commercial purposes. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 96, pp. 1393-1396.

  • Filipsson, M. and Bruce, G. (1997). LUKAS—a preliminary report on a new Swedish speech synthesis. Working Papers (Dept. of Linguistics, Lund University), vol. 46, pp. 45-56.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frid, J. (1999). An environment for testing prosodic and phonetic transcriptions. In Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 2319-2322.

  • Hansson, P. (1999). Prosodic and lexical correlates of Swedish discourse markers in spontaneous dialogue. In Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 1533-1536.

  • Hansson, P. (2000). Focally accented topics. In Proceedings of Fonetik 2000. The Swedish Phonetics Conference, May 24- 26, 2000. Dept. of Languages, Högskolan Skövde, pp. 65-68.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horne, M. (1991). Why do speakers accent 'Given' information? In Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, pp. 1279-1282.

  • Horne, M., Filipsson, M., Ljungqvist, M., and Lindström, A. (1993). Referent tracking in restricted texts using a lemmatized lexicon: Implications for generation of prosody. In Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, pp. 2011-2014.

  • Horne, M., Hansson, P., Bruce, G., Frid, J., and Filipsson, M. (In press). Cue words and the topic structure of spoken discourse: The case of Swedish men 'but'. Journal of Pragmatics.

  • Jönsson, A. (1997). A model for habitable and efficient dialogue management for natural language interaction. Natural Language Engineering, 3(2/3):103-122.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kohler, K. (1987). Categorical pitch perception. In Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Phonetic Science, pp. 331-333.

  • Pierrehumbert, J. and Steele, S. (1989). Categories of tonal alignment in English. Phonetica, 46:181-196.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rump, H. and Collier, R. (1996). Focus conditions and the prominence of pitch-accented syllables. Language and Speech, 39:1-17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schank, R.C. (1982). Dynamic Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sedivy, J.C., Carlson, G.N., Tanenhaus, M.K., Spivy-Knowlton, M., and Eberhard, K. 1994. The cognitive function of contrast sets in processing focus constructions. In P. Bosch and R. Van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus and Natural Language Processing. Working Papers of the Institute for Logic and Linguistics (IBM Heidelberg), vol. 8, pp. 611-619.

  • Terken, J. and Hirschberg, J. (1994). Deaccentuation of words representing 'given' information: Effects of persistence of grammatical function and surface position. Language and Speech, 37:125-145.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomlin, R. (1995). Focal attention, voice, and word order: an experimental, cross-linguistic study. In P. Downing and M. Noonan (Eds.), Word Order in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 517-554.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vallduví, E. and Engdahl, E. (1996). The linguistic realization of information packaging. Linguistics, 34:459-519.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wichmann, A., House, J., and Rietveld, T. (1997). Peak displacement and topic structure. In Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Intonation (Athens), pp. 329-332.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Horne, M., Hansson, P., Bruce, G. et al. Accent Patterning on Domain-Related Information in Swedish Travel Dialogues. International Journal of Speech Technology 4, 93–102 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011336824407

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011336824407

Navigation