Ana Isabel Mata

• University of Lisbon

This paper presents an acoustic-prosodic analysis of entrainment in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese. Our main goal is to analyze how turn-by-turn entrainment varies with distinct structural metadata events: types of sentence-like units (SUs) in consecutive turns (e.g. interrogatives followed by declaratives, or both declaratives), and wit...

This paper presents an affective and acoustic-prosodic analysis of a call-center corpus (700 phone calls with corresponding customer satisfaction levels). Our main goal is to understand how customers' satisfaction correlates to the acoustic-prosodic and affective information (emotions and personality traits) of the interactions. A subset of 30 call...

This paper presents a global analysis of entrainment in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese, including 48 dialogues, between 24 speakers. Our main goal is to analyze the acoustic-prosodic similarities between speaker pairs, namely if there are global entrainment cues displayed in the dialogues, if entrainment is manifested in distinct sets of...

This paper presents an analysis of discourse markers in two spontaneous speech corpora for European Portuguese - university lectures and map-task dialogues - and also in a collection of tweets, aiming at contributing to their categorization, scarcely existent for European Portuguese. Our results show that the selection of discourse markers is domai...

In sign language, sentence connections are not always explicit, or so easily identifiable as in spoken / written language, since these seem to be mostly undertaken by non-lexical elements. This study aims to describe the structures related to different values associated to the connector "and" in Portuguese Sign Language (Língua Gestual Portuguesa –...

This paper performs a global analysis of entrainment between dyads in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese (EP), including 48 dialogues, between 24 speakers. Our main goals focus on the acoustic-prosodic similarities between speakers, namely if there are global entrainment cues displayed in the dialogues, if there are degrees of entrainment ma...

This work describes the discourse markers present in two corpora for European Portuguese, in different domains (university lectures and map-task dialogues). In this study, we also perform a multiclass automatic classification task based on prosodic features to verify in both corpora which words are discourse markers, which are disfluencies, and whi...

This paper investigates the correlation between the prosodic properties and pragmatic functions of affirmative constituents in adult-adult interactions in European Portuguese (CORAL corpus). 515 affirmative constituents produced in 460 answers, extracted from 11 dialogues between 12 speakers, were analyzed. Results show that: i) sim 'yes', ok and g...

Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields is a volume of empirical research papers incorporating recent theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary advances in the field of intonation, as they relate to the Ibero-Romance languages. The volume brings together leading experts in Catalan, Portuguese, and Span...

Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields is a volume of empirical research papers incorporating recent theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary advances in the field of intonation, as they relate to the Ibero-Romance languages. The volume brings together leading experts in Catalan, Portuguese, and Span...

This work describes the discourse markers present in two corpora for European Portuguese, in different domains (university lectures and map-task dialogues). In this study, we also perform a multiclass automatic classification task based on prosodic features to verify in both corpora which words are discourse markers, which are disfluencies, and whi...

Discourse markers are universal linguistic events subject to language variation. Although an extensive literature has already reported language specific traits of these events, little has been said on their cross-language behavior and on building an inventory of multilingual lexica of discourse markers. This work describes new methods and approache...

This work describes a framework that encompasses multi-layered linguistic information, focusing on prosodic features (pitch, energy, and tempo patterns), uses such features to distinguish between sentence-form types and disfluency/fluency repairs, and contributes to the characterization of intonational patterns of spontaneous and prepared speech in...

The present study aims to investigate intonation contours in phrase-final position, in a corpus of spontaneous and prepared unscripted presentations from teenagers (14-15 years old) and adults, collected in a school context. Taking into account the differences between phrasing levels (ToBI breaks 3 and 4), we show that the frequency of low/falling...

This work explores speaking style effects in the production of disfluencies. University lectures and map-task dialogues are analyzed in order to evaluate if the prosodic strategies used when uttering disfluencies vary across speaking styles. Our results show that the distribution of disfluency types is not arbitrary across lectures and dialogues. M...

This paper presents a linguistic revision process of a speech corpus of Portuguese broadcast news focusing on metadata annotation for rich transcription, and reports on the impact of the new data on the performance for several modules. The main focus of the revision process consisted on annotating and revising structural metadata events, such as di...

This paper presents the annotation guidelines applied to naturally occurring speech, aiming at an integrated account of contrast and parallel structures in European Portuguese. These guidelines were defined to allow for the empirical study of interactions among intonation and syntax-discourse patterns in selected sets of different corpora (monologu...

We present a corpus of European Portuguese spoken by teenagers and adults in school context, CPE-FACES, with an overview of the differential characteristics of high school oral presentations and the challenges this data poses to automatic speech processing. The CPE-FACES corpus has been created with two main goals: to provide a resource for the stu...

This paper describes our exploratory work in applying the Auto-matic ToBI annotation system (AuToBI), originally developed for Standard American English, to European Portuguese. This work is motivated by the current availability of large amounts of (highly spontaneous) transcribed data and the need to fur-ther enrich those transcripts with prosodic...

This paper describes a framework that extends automatic speech transcripts in order to accommodate relevant information coming from manual transcripts, the speech signal itself, and other resources, like lexica. The proposed framework automatically collects, relates, computes, and stores all relevant information together in a self-contained data so...

This work explores prosodic cues of disfluencies in a cor-pus of university lectures. Results show three significant (p < 0.001) trends: pitch and energy slopes are signif-icantly different between the disfluency and the onset of fluency; those features are also relevant to disfluency type differentiation; and they do not seem to be a speaker-effec...

This paper analyzes the prosodic properties of disfluencies and of their contexts in a corpus of university lectures. Results show that there is a general tendency to repair fluency by means of prosodic contrast marking strategies (pitch and energy in-crease), regardless of the specific disfluency type, but still there are degrees in the contrast m...

The aim of this work is twofold: to quantify the distinct interrogative types in different domains for European Portuguese, and to discuss the weight of the linguistic features that best describe these structures, in order to model interrogatives in speech. We analyzed spoken dialogue, university lectures, and broadcast news corpora, and, for the...

This paper describes our recent work on extending the punctuation module of automatic subtitles for Portuguese Broadcast News. The main improvement was achieved by the use of prosodic information. This enabled the extension of the previous module which covered only full stops and commas, to cover question marks as well. The approach uses lexical, a...

This work explores prosodic/acoustic cues for improving a baseline phone segmentation module. The baseline version is provided by a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system. An analysis of the baseline results revealed problems in word boundary detection, that we tried to solve by using post-processing rules based on prosodic features...

This work explores prosodic cues of disfluent phenomena. We have conducted a perceptual experiment to test if listeners would rate all disfluencies as disfluent events or if some of them would be rated as fluent devices in specific prosodic contexts. Results pointed out significant differences (p vs. disfluency. Distinct prosodic properties of thes...

This paper describes the corpus of university lectures that has been recorded in European Portuguese, and some of the recognition experiments we have done with it. The highly specific topic domain and the spontaneous speech nature of the lectures are two of the most challenging problems. Lexical and language model adaptation proved difficult given...

This paper explores the results of a previous experiment concerning listeners' ratings of different types of (dis)fluencies and extends the analysis of such phenomena to a corpus of university lectures. Results suggest that, although not all disfluency types are equally tolerated by listeners, such differences may be overridden by an adequate contr...

This paper reports preliminary results from a study of disfluencies in European Portuguese, based on a corpus of prepared (non-scripted) and spontaneous oral presentations in high school context. We will focus on the contextual distribution and temporal patterns of filled pauses and segmental prolongations, as well as on the way those are rated by...

This paper describes a set of experiments aiming at the construction and evaluation of a new phrasing module for European Portuguese text-to-speech synthesis, using classification and regression trees learned from hand-labelled texts. Using the assessment criteria of matching boundary predictions against the corresponding labelled ones, the best so...

This paper describes a set of experiments aiming at the construction and evaluation of a new phrasing module for European Portuguese text-to-speech synthesis, using classification and regression trees learned from hand-labelled texts. Using the assessment criteria of matching boundary predictions against the corresponding labelled ones, the best so...

Nowadays, to reflect on the problems and challenges which are associated with the education matrix of language teachers in the 21 st century means, from my perspective, to look and listen in order to try: • to establish a relationship between the status oral skills and literacy hold in today's world and the core functions of teachers; • to understa...

Introdução Este poster tem como objectivo divulgar o trabalho do projecto Netlíngu@, desenvolvido desde Janeiro de 2001 na área de Didáctica do Português -Língua do Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica da FLUL, em parceria com a uARTE–MCT. Integrado no programa de formação inicial de professores de língua portuguesa (e não esquecendo a form...

In this paper we identify intonation cues that can disambiguate confirmation-seeking questions in adult-child dialogue in European Portuguese (EP). 301 examples of confirmation requests answered by two children and uttered by three different adults were analysed. Results show that (i) most confirmation-seeking questions (92.7%) do not present the i...

The analysis of question-answer pairs in a corpus of child-adult interaction in European Portuguese offers evidence that at least from 2;0 the intonation patterns of children's answers varies according to the discourse context and signals early sensitivity to the pragmatic value of the question. After 2;0 there is a general increase of low/falling...