TY - CHAP A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Interactional Adequacy as a Factor in the Perception of Synthesized Speech T2 - Proceedings of Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW8) N2 - Speaking as part of a conversation is different from reading out aloud. Speech synthesis systems, however, are typically developed using assumptions (at least implicitly) that are more true of the latter than the former situation. We address one particular aspect, which is the assumption that a fully formulated sentence is available for synthesis. We have built a system that does not make this assumption but rather can synthesize speech given incrementally extended input. In an evaluation experiment, we found that in a dynamic domain where what is talked about changes quickly, subjects rated the output of this system as more ‘naturally pronounced’ than that of a baseline system that employed standard synthesis, despite the synthesis quality objectively being degraded. Our results highlight the importance of considering a synthesizer’s ability to support interactive use-cases when determining the adequacy of synthesized speech. KW - speech synthesis KW - incremental processing KW - interactive behaviour KW - evaluation KW - adequacy Y1 - 2013 UR - https://www.isca-speech.org/archive_v0/ssw8/papers/ssw8_223.pdf CY - Barcelona, Spain ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Open-ended, Extensible System Utterances Are Preferred, Even If They Require Filled Pauses T2 - 14th annual meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2013) : Metz, France, 22 - 24 August 2013 N2 - In many environments (e. g. sports commentary), situations incrementally unfold over time and often the future appearance of a relevant event can be predicted, but not in all its details or precise timing. We have built a simulation framework that uses our incremental speech synthesis component to assemble in a timely manner complex commentary utterances. In our evaluation, the resulting output is preferred over that from a baseline system that uses a simpler commenting strategy. Even in cases where the incremental system overcommits temporally and requires a filled pause to wait for the upcoming event, the system is preferred over the baseline. Y1 - 2013 UR - https://aclanthology.org/W13-4042.pdf SP - 280 EP - 283 PB - Curran CY - Red Hook, NY ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Atterer, Michaela A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Towards Incremental End-of-Utterance Detection in Dialogue Systems T2 - COLING '08: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Manchester United Kingdom August 18 - 22, 2008 N2 - We define the task of incremental or 0-lag utterance segmentation, that is, the task of segmenting an ongoing speech recognition stream into utterance units, and present first results. We use a combination of hidden event language model, features from an incremental parser, and acoustic / prosodic features to train classifiers on real-world conversational data (from the Switchboard corpus). The best classifiers reach an F-score of around 56%, improving over baseline and related work. Y1 - 2008 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221101778_Towards_Incremental_End-of-Utterance_Detection_in_Dialogue_Systems SN - 978-1-905593-44-6 SP - 11 EP - 14 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Evaluating Prosodic Processing for Incremental Speech Synthesis T2 - Proceedings of Interspeech 2012 N2 - Incremental speech synthesis (iSS) accepts input and produces output in consecutive chunks that only together result in a full utterance. Systems that use iSS thus have the ability to adapt their utterances while they are ongoing. Having available less than the full utterance to plan the acoustic realisation has downsides, however, as global optimisation is not possible anymore. In this paper we present a strategy for incrementalizing the symbolic pre-processing component of speech synthesis and assess the influence of a reduction in "lookahead", i. e. in knowledge about the rest of the utterance, on prosodic quality. We found that high quality incremental output can be achieved even with a lookahead of slightly less than one phrase, allowing for timely system reaction. KW - speech synthesis KW - spoken dialogue systems KW - incrementality KW - prosody Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2012-152 SP - 438 EP - 441 PB - International Speech Communication Association ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Inpro_iSS: A Component for Just-In-Time Incremental Speech Synthesis T2 - The 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - proceedings of the System Demonstrations, April 23 - 27 2012, Avignon France N2 - We present a component for incremental speech synthesis (iSS) and a set of applications that demonstrate its capabilities. This component can be used to increase the responsivity and naturalness of spoken interactive systems. While iSS can show its full strength in systems that generate output incrementally, we also discuss how even otherwise unchanged systems may profit from its capabilities. Y1 - 2012 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Peldszus, Andreas A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Joint Satisfaction of Syntactic and Pragmatic Constraints Improves Incremental Spoken Language Understanding T2 - EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH, Visualization of Linguistic Patterns and Uncovering Language History from Multilingual Resources, Proceedings of the Workshop, April 23 - 24 2012, Avignon France N2 - We present a model of semantic processing of spoken language that (a) is robust against ill-formed input, such as can be expected from automatic speech recognisers, (b) respects both syntactic and pragmatic constraints in the computation of most likely interpretations, (c) uses a principled, expressive semantic representation formalism (RMRS) with a well-defined model theory, and (d) works continuously (producing meaning representations on a word-by-word basis, rather than only for full utterances) and incrementally (computing only the additional contribution by the new word, rather than re-computing for the whole utterance-so-far). We show that the joint satisfaction of syntactic and pragmatic constraints improves the performance of the NLU component (around 10 % absolute, over a syntax-only baseline). Y1 - 2012 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233540473_Joint_Satisfaction_of_Syntactic_and_Pragmatic_Constraints_Improves_Incremental_Spoken_Language_Understanding SN - 978-1-937284-19-0 SP - 514 EP - 523 PB - The Association for Computational Linguistics ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - Collaborating on Utterances with a Spoken Dialogue System Using an ISU-based Approach to Incremental Dialogue Management T2 - SIGDIAL 10, Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Tokyo Japan September 24 - 25, 2010 N2 - When dialogue systems, through theuse of incremental processing, arenot bounded anymore by strict, non-overlapping turn-taking, a whole range ofadditional interactional devices becomesavailable. We explore the use of one suchdevice, trial intonation. We elaborateour approach to dialogue managementin incremental systems, based on theInformation-State-Update approach, anddiscuss an implementation in a micro-domain that lends itself to the use ofimmediate feedback, trial intonations andexpansions. In an overhearer evaluation,the incremental system was judged as sig-nificantly more human-like and reactivethan a non-incremental version. Y1 - 2010 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220794407_Collaborating_on_Utterances_with_a_Spoken_Dialogue_System_Using_an_ISU-based_Approach_to_Incremental_Dialogue_Management SN - 978-1-932432-85-5 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics CY - Tokyo, Japan ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schlangen, David A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Atterer, Michaela T1 - Incremental Reference Resolution: The Task, Metrics for Evaluation, and a Bayesian Filtering Model that is Sensitive to Disfluencies T2 - Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference: The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, September 11 - 12, 2009, London United Kingdom N2 - In this paper we do two things: a) we discuss in general terms the task of incre mental reference resolution (IRR), in particular resolution of exophoric reference, and specify metrics for measuring the performance of dialogue system components tackling this task, and b) we present a simple Bayesian filtering model of IRR that performs reasonably well just using words directly (no structure information and no hand-coded semantics): it picks the right referent out of 12 for around 50 % of real world dialogue utterances in our test corpus. It is also able to learn to interpret not only words but also hesitations, just as humans have shown to do in similar situations, namely as markers of references tohard-to-describe entities. Y1 - 2009 UR - https://clp.ling.uni-potsdam.de/publications/Schlangen-2009-2.pdf SP - 30 EP - 37 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics CY - London, UK ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schlangen, David A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Buschmeier, Hendrik A1 - Buß, Okko A1 - Kopp, Stefan A1 - Skantze, Gabriel A1 - Yaghoubzadeh, Ramin T1 - Middleware for Incremental Processing in Conversational Agents T2 - Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SigDial 2010), September 24 - 25, 2010, Tokyo Japan N2 - We describe work done at three sites on designing conversational agents capable of incremental processing. We focus on the ‘middleware’ layer in these systems, which takes care of passing around and maintaining incremental information between the modules of such agents. All implementations are based on the abstract model of incremental dialogue processing proposed by Schlangen and Skantze (2009), and the paper shows what different instantiations of the model can look like given specific requirements and application areas. Y1 - 2010 UR - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47735874_Middleware_for_Incremental_Processing_in_Conversational_Agents SP - 51 EP - 54 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics CY - Tokyo, Japan ER - TY - CHAP A1 - van Welbergen, Herwin A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David A1 - Kopp, Stefan T1 - Incremental, Adaptive and Interruptive Speech Realization for Fluent Conversation with ECAs T2 - Intelligent Virtual Agents N2 - This project aimed to establish the feasibility of creating a procedural system for generating expressive facial animation based on an affective agent. A procedural system supporting a limited number of emotional expression changes was created alongside keyframed animations of these same emotional expression changes, and audience response to these two approaches was tested empirically. Results seem to partially support the procedural animations generated being comparable with keyframed, in terms of perceptual validity. KW - artificial intelligence KW - cognitive modeling KW - gestures KW - nonverbal communication KW - social interaction Y1 - 2013 UR - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-642-40415-3/1?pdf=chapter%20toc SN - 978-3-642-40414-6 SP - 468 EP - 469 PB - Springer ER - TY - CHAP A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus A1 - Baumann, Timo A1 - Schlangen, David T1 - TELIDA: A Package for Manipulation and Visualisation of Timed Linguistic Data T2 - Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference: The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, September 11 - 12, 2009, London United Kingdom N2 - We present a toolkit for manipulating andvisualising time-aligned linguistic datasuch as dialogue transcripts or languageprocessing data. The package comple-ments existing editing tools by allowingfor conversion between their formats, in-formation extraction from the raw files,and by adding sophisticated, and easily ex-tended methods for visualising the dynam-ics of dialogue processing. To illustratethe versatility of the package, we describeits use in three different projects at our site. Y1 - 2009 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5555/1708376.1708419 SP - 302 EP - 305 PB - Association for Computational Linguistics CY - London, UK ER -