Towards Naturally Responsive Spoken Dialog Systems by Modelling Pragmatic-Prosody Correlations of Discourse Markers

Human speakers in a dialog adapt their responses and the way they convey them to their interlocutors by appropriately tuning their prosody, taking into account the context in which the dialog takes place. Today's spoken dialog systems are incapable of exhibiting such natural responsive behavior. Hence, there is a need for models that enable the selection of better prosody in system responses to make them appropriate to the pragmatic intentions and the dialog context. This submission includes the detailed description of my preliminary study on the prosody of discourse markers, the methods used and my initial findings that corroborate the existence of correlations between prosody and pragmatic intentions of discourse markers in human-human dialogs. These correlations, if modeled accurately, can help dialog systems respond with context-appropriate prosody.