tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of ‘okay’"

We examine the effect of contextual and acoustic cues in the disambiguation of three discourse-pragmatic functions of the word okay. Results of a perception study show that contextual cues are stronger predictors of discourse function than acoustic cues. However, acoustic features capturing the pitch excursion at the right edge of okay feature prominently in disambiguation, whether other contextual cues are present or not. | On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of okay Agustin Gravano Stefan Benus Hector Chavez Julia Hirschberg Lauren Wilcox Department of Computer Science Columbia University New York NY USA agus sbenus hrc2009 julia lgw23 @ Abstract We examine the effect of contextual and acoustic cues in the disambiguation of three discourse-pragmatic functions of the word okay. Results of a perception study show that contextual cues are stronger predictors of discourse function than acoustic cues. However acoustic features capturing the pitch excursion at the right edge of okay feature prominently in disambiguation whether other contextual cues are present or not. 1 Introduction Cue phrases also known as DISCOURSE MARKERS are linguistic expressions that can be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse or to convey a semantic contribution Grosz and Sidner 1986 Reichman 1985 Cohen 1984 . For example the word okay can be used to convey a satisfactory evaluation of some entity in the discourse the movie was okay as a backchannel in a dialogue to indicate that one interlocutor is still attending to another to convey acknowledgment or agreement or in its cue use to start or finish a discourse segment Jefferson 1972 Schegloff and Sacks 1973 Kowtko 1997 Ward and Tsuka-hara 2000 . A major question is how speakers indicate and listeners interpret such variation in meaning. From a practical perspective understanding how speakers and listeners disambiguate cue phrases is important to spoken dialogue systems so that systems can convey potentially ambiguous terms with their intended meaning and can interpret user input correctly. There is considerable evidence that the different 800 uses of individual cue phrases can be distinguished by variation in the prosody with which they are realized. For example Hirschberg andLitman 1993 found that cue phrases in general could be disambiguated between their semantic and their discourse marker .