Abstract
This paper offers a contribution to the intonational modelling of backchannel lexical and non-lexical tokens in Italian, which can be used for improving naturalness in voice-based dialogue systems. Results of pragmatic and intonation analysis of five Map Task dialogues show that backchannel tokens can convey the intention of giving vs taking the floor by means of a rising vs falling terminal contour. However, they also indicate that this general rule can be override when other pragmatic and/or paralinguistic meanings need to be additionally conveyed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Anderson, A., Bader, M., Bard, E.G., Boyle, E., Doherty, G., Garrod, S., Isard, S., Kowtko, J., MacAllister, J., Miller, J., Sotillo, C., Thompson, H., Weinert, R.: The HCRC map task corpus. Lang. Speech 34(4), 351–366 (1991)
Benus, S., Gravano, A., Hirschberg, J.: The prosody of backchannels in American English. In: 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Saarbruecken, pp. 1065–1068 (2007)
Boersma, P., Weenink, D.: Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot Int. 5(9/10), 341–345 (2001)
Boyle, E., Anderson, A.H., Newlands, A.: The effects of visibility on dialogue and performance in a cooperative problem solving task. Lang. Speech 37(1), 1–20 (1994)
Carletta, J., Isard, A., Isard, S., Kowtko, J., Doherty-Sneddon, G., Anderson, A.: The reliability of a dialogue structure coding scheme. Comput. Linguist. 23(1), 13–32 (1997)
Caspers, J.: Melodic characteristics of backchannels in Dutch Map Task dialogues. In: International Conference of Spoken Language Processing 2000, Bejing (2000)
Cathcart, N., Carletta, J., Klein, E.: A shallow model of backchannel continuers in spoken dialogue. In: 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL, vol. 1, pp. 51–58 (2003)
Cerrato, L, D’Imperio, M.: Duration and tonal characteristics of short expressions in Italian. In: 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 1213–1216 (2003)
Clark, H.H., Brennan, S.E.: Grounding in communication. In: Resnick, L.B., Levine, J., Tearsely, S.D. (eds.) Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, pp. 127–149. American Psychological Association, Washington (1991)
Clark, H.H., Shaefer, E.F.: Contributing to discourse. Cog. Sci. 13, 259–294 (1989)
Gravano, A., Hirschberg, J.: Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented dialogue. In: Interspeech 2009, pp. 1019–1022 (2009)
Grice, M., Savino, M.: Map tasks in Italian: asking questions about given, accessible and new information. Catalan J. Linguist. 2, 153–180 (2003)
Jefferson, G.: Notes on systematic deployment of the acknowledgment tokens “yeah” and “mm hm”. TILL, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (1983)
Jurafsky, D., Shriberg E., Fox, B., Curl, T.: Lexical, prosodic, and syntactic cues for dialogue acts. In: ACL/COLING Workshop on Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers, pp. 114–120 (1998)
Misu, T., Mizukami, E., Shiga, Y., Kawamoto, S., Kawai, H., Nakamura, S. (2011). Towards contruction of spoken dialogue system that evokes users’ spontaneous backchannels. In: SIGDIAL 2011, Portland, pp. 259–265
Ohala, J.: An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of voice. Phonetica 41, 1–16 (1984)
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A., Jefferson, G.: A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4), 696–735 (1974)
Savino, M.: Non-finality and pre-finality in Bari Italian intonation: a preliminary account. In: Eurospeech 2001, Aalborg, pp. 939–942 (2001)
Savino, M.: Intonational cues to discourse structure in a variety of Italian. In: Gilles, P., Peters, J. (eds.) Regional Variation in Intonation, pp. 145–159. Niemeyer, Tübingen (2004)
Savino, M.: Prosodic strategies for backchanneling in Italian Map Task dialogues. In: ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, Athens, pp. 157–160 (2010)
Savino, M., Refice, M.: Acknowledgement or reply? Prosodic features for disambiguating pragmatic functions of the Italian token ‘sì’. In: SpeD 2013, Cluj-Napoca, pp.117–122 (2013)
Schegloff, E.: Discourse as an interactional achievement: some uses of ‘hu huh’ and other things that come between sentences. In: Tannen, D. (ed.) Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk, pp. 71–93. Georgetown University Press, Washington DC (1982)
Ward, N.: The relationship between sound and meaning in Japanese backchannels grunts. In: Meeting of the Japanese Association for National Language Processing, Fukuoka, pp. 464–467 (1998)
Ward, N.: Pragmatic function of prosodic features in non-lexical utterances. In: Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, (on CD-ROM) (2004)
Ward, N., Tsukahara, W.: Prosodic features which cue back-channel responses in English and Japanese. J. Pragmat. 32, 1177–1207 (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Savino, M. (2014). The Intonation of Backchannel Tokens in Italian Collaborative Dialogues. In: Vetulani, Z., Mariani, J. (eds) Human Language Technology Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics. LTC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8387. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08958-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08958-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08957-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08958-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)