LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS MONOGRAPH SERIES A25 Linguistic Patterns in Spontaneous Speech Edited by Shu-Chuan Tseng Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan 2009 Table of Contents List of Contributors ........................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... v Overview of this volume ............................................................................................... vii I. Spontaneity: definition and standard Can there be Standards for Spontaneous Speech? Towards an Ontology for Speech Resource Exploitation Dafydd Gibbon .................................................................................................. 1 II. Variation: allophones and registers Analysis of Language Variation Using a Large-Scale Corpus of Spontaneous Speech Kikuo Maekawa............................................................................................... 27 Situational Characteristics and Register Variation: A Case Study of the Particle suo in Mandarin Chinese Jen Ting ........................................................................................................... 51 Voice Quality Dependent Speech Recognition Tae-Jin Yoon, Xiaodan Zhuang, Jennifer Cole and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson.................................................... 77 III. Prosody: feature and processing Prosodic Hierarchy as an Organizing Framework for the Sources of Context in Phone-Based and Articulatory-Feature-Based Speech Recognition Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Jennifer Cole, Ken Chen, Partha Lal, Amit Juneja, Tae-Jin Yoon, Sarah Borys and Xiaodan Zhuang .....................101 Prosodic Features of Spontaneous Utterance-initial Phrases in Bernese and Valais Swiss German Adrian Leemann and Beat Siebenhaar............................................................129 Linguistic Patterns Detected Through a Prosodic Segmentation in Spontaneous Taiwan Mandarin Speech Yi-Fen Liu and Shu-Chuan Tseng ..................................................................147 i IV. Disfluency: pattern and detection Prolongation of Clause-initial Mono-word Phrases in Japanese Yasuharu Den .................................................................................................167 Spontaneous Mandarin Speech Recognition with Disfluencies Detected by Latent Prosodic Modeling (LPM) Che-Kuang Lin, Shu-Chuan Tseng and Lin-Shan Lee ...................................193 V. Spoken dialogue: communication and recognition Prosodic Similarities of Dialog Act Boundaries Across Speaking Styles Elizabeth Shriberg, Benoit Favre, James Fung, Dilek Hakkani-Tür and Sébastien Cuendet.....................................................213 Exploring Silence Application and Politeness Strategies in Interpersonal Business Communication Annie Wenhui Yang .......................................................................................241 Recognizing Local Dialogue Structures and Dialogue Acts Kenji Takano and Akira Shimazu...................................................................263 References ...................................................................................................................275 ii List of Contributors Sarah Borys ECE Department and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. Ken Chen The Genome Sequencing Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, USA. Jennifer Cole Linguistics Department and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. Sébastien Cuendet Speech Group, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA. Yasuharu Den Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, Faculty of Letters, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan. Benoit Favre Speech Group, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA. James Fung Speech Group, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA. Dafydd Gibbon Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany. Dilek Hakkani-Tür Speech Group, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA. Mark Hasegawa-Johnson ECE Department and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. Amit Juneja Senior Development Team, Think-a-Move, Ltd., Beachwood, USA. Partha Lal Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. Lin-Shan Lee College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. iii Adrian Leemann Hirose & Minematsu Laboratory, School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. Department of Linguistics, University of Berne, Berne, Switzerland. Che-Kuang Lin Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Yi-Fen Liu Institute of Information Systems and Applications, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. Kikuo Maekawa Department of Language Research, The National Institute for Japanese Language, Tokyo, Japan. Akira Shimazu School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan. Elizabeth Shriberg Speech Technology and Research Laboratory, SRI International, Menlo Park, USA. Speech Group, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA. Beat Siebenhaar Institute of German Studies, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. Kenji Takano School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan. Jen Ting Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Shu-Chuan Tseng Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Annie Wenhui Yang Faculty of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, P.R. China. Tae-Jin Yoon Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Xiaodan Zhuang ECE Department and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank a number of people for their significant contribution to the preparation of this book. The majority of the papers have been selected from the papers presented at the International Symposium on Linguistic Patterns in Spontaneous Speech held in the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, in 2006. I am grateful to all the invited speakers and authors who submitted papers to the symposium as well as authors who accepted my invitation to contribute to this book. They all made the symposium a successful event and made this book possible. I want to express my gratitude to the re- viewers of Language and Linguistics and to Professor Kathleen Ahrens and Dr. Elizabeth Zeitoun who gave useful and constructive comments on the original manuscript. I would also like to thank Ms. Joyce Kuo for all her careful and graceful work on reformatting the manuscript. Surely, all shortcomings remain my own responsibility. Shu-Chuan Tseng August 2008 v Overview of this volume An introduction to this book presupposes an understanding of what spontaneous speech is. As mentioned in Gibbon’s chapter, spontaneous speech is a type of natural and authentic speech produced without any external influence, out of a momentary impulse of the speaker. In the literature on linguistic studies of spoken language, we have observed a shift of data types in question from isolated to connected, from solicited to non-solicited, from imitative to non-imitative, and from prepared/planned to non-prepared/ non-planned. In the field of phonetic analysis, observations and measurements were done on isolated words first, then on connected discourse (Lehiste 1972, Klatt 1975, Beckman & Edwards 1990, O’Shaughnessy 1995, Kohler 1996). Both segmental and suprasegmental characteristics have been shown to be different in isolated context and in natural speech. Psycholinguists have long noticed the importance of natural speech, as various experiments (perception and production) and observations have been done on sponta- neous speech (Goldman-Eisler 1968, Levelt 1989). Early linguistic development of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children has been investigated on both imitative and spontaneous speech data (Musselman & Kircaal-Iftar 1996, Leonard et al. 1981). Moreover, prosodic analysis deals with natural speech directly. Issues such as intonation contour patterns, prosodic annotation, prosodic phrasing and marking are complex, when spontaneous speech is involved (Pierrehumbert 1980, Levelt & Cutler 1983, Fowler & Housum 1987, Nakatani & Hirschberg 1994). For a number of research disciplines, the form under investigation commences with connected, natural, spontaneous speech. Conversation analysis is one of these fields (Du Bois et al. 1993, Sacks et al. 1974, Schegloff 1982). Works on disfluency are also based on spontaneous speech data, though the focus may be on speech perception, the patterns in natural speech with regard to speech technology, or the indication to discourse structure (Shriberg 1994, Lickley 1996, Swerts 1998, Tseng 1999). As a whole, discussions of spontaneous speech are not new at all. But it has become more popular to use the term “spontaneous speech” in the discipline of speech technology in the last two decades or so, mainly as a contrast to read speech. Out of this recent development, the main aim of this book is to accommodate different research interests involved in the disciplines of linguistics and speech technology.