Dialogue Prosody in Interactive Voice Response Systems

目前的交互式语音应答(IVR)系统中合成语音的不自然感是由于缺乏自然韵律变化造成的。虽然最先进的IVR系统通常是高度可理解的，在简短的提示或当要说的文本接近系统数据库中记录的语音时，听起来可能很自然，但一旦它们偏离了这些狭窄的界限，结果就会从“无聊和机械的”到“奇怪和令人困惑的”。为了解决这些不足，PI正在开发一种新的方法来学习对话系统的轮廓分配，该方法在没有大量新注释的情况下避免了稀疏数据的问题。他们提出了一系列假设，即对话语境的哪些特征会影响说话者从语料库中选择轮廓，并通过一系列有针对性的实验室实验来检验这些假设。通过设计一套仔细控制的产出和感知研究，个人识别将能够确定哪些语调特征被证明与轮廓选择最可靠，哪些语调特征对听者来说最显著。从实用的角度来看，包含适当分配完整语调轮廓的IVR系统将极大地增强系统的自然感。从科学的角度来看，这样的模型将扩大我们对说话者如何使用和听者如何解释语调轮廓变化的理解。从社会角度来看，与用户自然互动的IVR系统的创建将提高这类系统的可接受性，使所有人无处不在地获得信息和服务的愿景更接近现实。

The unnaturalness of synthesized speech found in current interactive voice response (IVR) systems is due to the lack of natural prosodic variation. While state-of-the-art IVR systems are often highly intelligible and may sound natural for short prompts or when the text to be spoken is close to speech recorded for the system's database, once they deviate from these narrow bounds, results range from "boring and mechanical" to "odd and confusing." To address these deficiencies, the PIs are developing a new method for learning contour assignment for dialogue systems that avoids the sparse data problem without massive new annotation. They have generated a series of hypotheses about which features of the dialogue context influence human speakers' choice of contour from corpora and are testing these hypotheses via a series of targeted laboratory experiments. By designing a carefully controlled set of production and perception studies, the PIs will be able to determine which intonational features prove to be most reliably correlated with contour choice and which are perceptually most salient for listeners.From a practical viewpoint, an IVR system that incorporates the appropriate assignment of full intonational contours will greatly enhance the perceived naturalness of the system. From a scientific viewpoint, such a model will expand our understanding of how speakers use and hearers interpret intonational contour variation. From a social viewpoint, the creation of IVR systems that interact with users naturally will increase the acceptability of such systems, bringing the vision of ubiquitous access to information and services for all closer to reality.