Lexical frequency and listener's response to packet loss in telephone conversations

Abstract:

In today’s Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony, packet loss is one of the most prominent degradations. Severely bursty packet loss can lead to multiple consecutive packets and thus important parts of the transmitted speech to be lost. In listening-only tests, the understandability of packet loss-affected speech can be modeled based on the available audio cues in the signal. However, in real conversation scenarios, not every unintelligible word is important for the continuation of the conversation. Thus, even utterances that are largely affected by packet loss might not lead to a request of retransmission of the information (e.g., “Could you please repeat that?”) and thus disruption of the conversation flow. lexical frequency can be used as a tool to measure the importance of the information transmitted. In this paper, we analyzed a set of 84 packet loss degraded telephone conversations and investigated the ability of listeners to recover from missing words resulting from the packet loss as a function of their frequency. We found that the request for information retransmission appears more often for messages with less frequent words.


Year: 2022
In session: Interaction & Turn-taking
Pages: 74 to 80