Simon BetzBielefeld University · Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies
Simon Betz
Doctor of Philosophy
About
32
Publications
8,481
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Introduction
Welcome to my RG profile! I did my PhD research on hesitations in conversational speech synthesis. Beyond that I am interested in any kind of experimental investigation in phonetics, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. Currently I prepare investigations on speech synthesis evaluation using gamification and mouse tracking. For updates you are cordially invited to follow my projects and publications!
Additional affiliations
March 2020 - present
Education
October 2013 - December 2019
October 2006 - February 2013
Publications
Publications (32)
This study investigates the interplay of spoken and gestural hesitations under varying amounts of cognitive load. We argue that not only fillers and silences, as the most common hesitations, are directly related to speech pausing behavior, but that hesitation lengthening is as well. We designed a resource-management card game as a method to elicit...
It is a widely known phenomenon that silence among people engaged in dialogue can be awkward. In linguistic terms, the awkward silence could be understood as a silence threshold; a period of time that has to pass silently in dialogue after which any speaker will give in to the urge to contribute anything. Sometimes there will be nothing to contribu...
This study concerns hesitation strategies that tourist guides may use to manage their speech, with particular attention to individual variability. Previous work has pointed out that hesitation phenomena may occur as a tool to structure discourse and gain visitors' attention, and that linguistic idiosyncratic behavior may affect their production. Gi...
Recent endeavors have successfully tried to equip dialogue systems with hesitations [1][2]. Hesitations are useful when it comes to buying dialogue time or to support listeners in comprehension [2]. It has been found that hesitations furthermore create a bias towards complicated concepts [3]. In addition, one particular hesitation, namely lengtheni...
We present a crosslinguistic study on the interplay of hesitation silences and fillers in conversation. The research questions have been addressed for English in a previous DiSS workshop paper (Betz & Kosmala, 2019) and this study extends the analysis to German, Italian and French. The research questions are: 1) Does the type of the filler influenc...
The acknowledgment of the functional role of hesitations in speech has increased the research interest in investigating and modeling their occurrence in discourse. This study explores hesitation combinations and distribution in Italian discourse. Though clusters represent less frequent occurrences than standalone hesitations, it is still worth exam...
We present a new take on mouse-tracking to analyze online processing of speech. We expand current paradigms by embedding the task into a drag & drop game that awards a score as feedback for performance. The contribution of this paper is twofold: On the one hand, we describe the setup and design of a gamified graphical user interface to elicit data...
We investigate the occurrence of disfluencies (lengthening, filled pauses, silent pauses, abandoned utterances, and repairs) in German infant-directed speech (IDS), as compared to German adult-directed speech (ADS). The corpus consists of speech of nine mothers talking to their toddler (IDS condition), or to an adult experimenter (once in a task wi...
Speech synthesis applications have become an ubiquity, in navigation systems, digital assistants or as screen or audio book readers. Despite their impact on the acceptability of the systems in which they are embedded, and despite the fact that different applications probably need different types of TTS voices, TTS evaluation is still largely treate...
Spoken dialogue systems are predominantly evaluated using of-fline methods such as user ratings or task-oriented measures. Various phenomena in conversational speech, however, are known to affect the way the listener's comprehension unfolds over time, and not necessarily the final result of the comprehension process. For instance, in human referenc...
In order to model hesitations for technical applications such as conversational speech synthesis, it is desirable to understand interactions between individual hesitation markers. In this study, we explore a pair of markers that has been subject to many discussions: silences and fillers. While it is generally acknowledged that fillers occur in two...
Synthetic speech can be used to express uncertainty in dialogue systems by means of hesitation. If a phrase like "Next to the green tree" is uttered in a hesitant way, that is, containing lengthening, silences, and fillers, the listener can infer that the speaker is not certain about the concepts referred to. However, we do not know anything about...
Conversational spoken dialogue systems that interact with the user rather than merely reading the text can be equipped with hesitations to manage dialogue flow and user attention. Based on a series of empirical studies, we elaborated a hesitation synthesis strategy for dialogue systems, which inserts hesitations of a scalable extent wherever needed...
In this paper we present the implementation of a robot, that dynamically hesitates, based on the attention of the human interaction partner. To this end, we outline requirements for a real-time interaction scenario, describe the realization of a disfluency insertion strategy, and present observations from the first tests of the system.
Conversational spoken dialogue systems that interact with the user rather than merely reading text can be equipped with hesitations to manage the dialogue flow and the users' attention. Based on a series of empirical studies, we built an elaborated hesitation synthesis strategy for dialogue systems that inserts hesitations of scalable extent wherev...
We investigate segment prolongation as a means of disfluent hesitation in spontaneous German speech. We describe phonetic and structural features of disfluent prolongation and compare it to data of other languages and to non-disfluent prolongations.
Our overarching research project explores the usability of dis-fluencies in incremental spoken dialogue systems. This endeavor requires basic phonetic research on disfluencies in spontaneous speech corpora as to define strategies for synthesizing disfluencies in a meaningful way. In this paper, our current research focus lies in an investigation of...
We present the DUEL corpus, consisting of 24 hours of natural, face-to-face, loosely task-directed dialogue in German, French and Mandarin Chinese. The corpus is uniquely positioned as a cross-linguistic, multimodal dialogue resource controlled for domain. DUEL includes audio, video and body tracking data and is transcribed and annotated for disflu...
We investigate lengthening in spontaneous speech with the aim in mind to use it as a time-management strategy in incremental spoken dialogue systems. lengthening is a common feature of speech, occurring regularly near the edges of intonation phrases. It behaves similar to disfluencies when it occurs in places remote from phrasal boundaries. Disflue...
This study explores inter-and intra-speaker variation in use of time-management strategies. How do speakers differ in their use of pauses, fillers and other resources aimed at managing time while they plan their next contribution? Taking a rather qualitative approach, we describe individual speakers' production, using a small limited-domain corpus...
It has been shown that dialogue systems benefit from incremental architectures to produce fast responses and to interact with the interlocutor in a more human-like way. The advantage of quick responses yields the disadvantage of running out of things to say for a while. In such occasions, humans tend to produce disfluencies as a listener-oriented s...
Questions
Question (1)
The answer is not 42. I tried.
The question of course does not aim for a concrete answer. I am wondering whether there is an idea around, maybe in a publication which I did not find so far, how dense information is in an interval of hesitation. My first intuition would be - a hesitation interval marks a trough of zero information. My second thought was rather it is a trough, but not of zero information, as hesitations are known to have signaling potential and thus carry some sort of information. Then I asked myself how silences and fillers differ: Which of these has a higher ID relative to the context? Is there a general answer? It might be dependent on the surrounding ID whether a silence or a filler stands out more.
Any comments or hints to publications are very welcome.
