Work

Mhm... Yeah? Okay! Evaluating the Naturalness and Communicative Function of Synthesized Feedback Responses in Spoken Dialogue

Year: 2024

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: To create conversational systems with humanlike listener behavior, generating short feedback responses (e.g., "mhm", "ah", "wow") appropriate for their context is crucial.These responses convey their communicative function through their lexical form and their prosodic realization.In this paper, we transplant the prosody of feedback responses from humanhuman U.S. English telephone conversations to a target speaker using two synthesis techniques (TTS and signal processing).Our evaluation focuses on perceived naturalness, contextual appropriateness and preservation of communicative function.Results indicate TTS-generated feedback were perceived as more natural than signal-processing-based feedback, with no significant difference in appropriateness.However, the TTS did not consistently convey the communicative function of the original feedback.

Source: Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.46

Authors: Carol Figueroa, Marcel de Korte, Magalie Ochs, Gabriel Skantze

Institutions: Aix-Marseille Université, Laboratoire d’Informatique et Systèmes, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Language: English

Topic: Speech and dialogue systems

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: European Commission

Awards: G434337789, COnversational BRAins