Abstract
For a successful speech-controlled human-computer interaction (HCI) the pure textual information as well as individual skills, preferences, and affective states of the user have to be known. However, verbal human interaction consists of several information layers. Apart from pure textual information, further details regarding the speaker’s feelings, believes, and social relations are transmitted. The additional information is encoded through acoustics. Especially, the intonation reveals details about the speakers communicative relation and their attitude towards the ongoing dialogue.
Since the intonation is influenced by semantic and grammatical information, it is advisable to investigate the intonation of so-called discourse particles (DPs) as “hm” or “uhm”. They cannot be inflected but can be emphasised. DPs have the same intonation curves (pitch-contours) as whole sentences and thus may indicate the same functional meanings. For German language J. E. Schmidt empirically discovered seven types of form-function-concurrences on the isolated DP “hm”.
To determine the function within the dialogue of the DPs, methods are needed that preserve pitch-contours and are feasible to assign defined form-prototypes. Furthermore, it must be investigated which pitch-contours occur in naturalistic HCI and whether these contours are congruent with the findings by linguists.
In this paper we present first results on the extraction and correlation of the DP “hm”. We investigate the different form-function-relations in the naturalistic LAST MINUTE corpus and determine expectable formfunction relations in naturalistic HCI in general.
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Siegert, I., Prylipko, D., Hartmann, K., Böck, R., Wendemuth, A. (2014). Investigating the Form-Function-Relation of the Discourse Particle “hm” in a Naturalistic Human-Computer Interaction. In: Bassis, S., Esposito, A., Morabito, F. (eds) Recent Advances of Neural Network Models and Applications. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04129-2_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04129-2_39
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