Analysis of phonetic/prosodic features in interaction stages

Authors: Daniel Duran, Ronald Böck

Abstract:

In daily life, any kind of verbal and non-verbal communication can be considered as an interaction. Therefore, the entire lifetime comprises of a sequence of a multitude of interactions, being separated in stages. These stages are usually related to a specific aspect in the communication. The current paper investigates phonetic and prosodic features which can be used to understand differences in interaction stages from verbal cues. In this sense, the LAST MINUTE Corpus, comprising 133 naturalistic human-machine interactions, is analysed, especially considering (consecutive) interaction stages. A collection of phonetic/prosodic features, mainly extracted on utterance-level, were statistically analysed. The results indicated that especially the speech rate, articulation rate, and average syllable rate show significant differences in the observed interaction stages.