Audio quotation marks for natural language understanding

Audio quotation marks for natural language understanding

Boutin, Simon and Tremblay, Réal and Cardinal, Patrick and Peters, Doug and Dumouchel, Pierre

Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2015

Abstract : Detecting the presence of quotations in speech is a difficult task for automatic natural language understanding. This paper presents a study on the correlation between three prosodic features present in a voice command and the presence or absence of quotations. These features consist of intra-word pause durations, F0 reset and F0 continuity. A combination of lexical and prosodic extraction tools was used to extract these features. The two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was then used to compare the distributions of the collected measures. The results show a correlation between these features and the presence or absence of quotations. Moreover, the results show that it is possible to use these features to differentiate direct from indirect quotations.