Exploring prosody in interaction control

This paper investigates prosodic aspects of turn-taking in conversation with a view to improving the efficiency of identifying relevant places at which a machine can legitimately begin to talk to a human interlocutor. It examines the relationship between interaction control, the communicative function of which is to regulate the flow of information between interlocutors, and its phonetic manifestation. Specifically, the listener's perception of such interaction control phenomena is modelled. Algorithms for automatic online extraction of prosodic phenomena liable to be relevant for interaction control, such as silent pauses and intonation patterns, are presented and evaluated in experiments using Swedish map task data. We show that the automatically extracted prosodic features can be used to avoid many of the places where current dialogue systems run the risk of interrupt-ing their users, as well as to identify suitable places to take the turn.