Prosodic cues to word usage

Abstract

In this study we examined prosodic characteristics of a word used in several distinct senses in a task-oriented corpus of spontaneous speech. We compared the pitch characteristics of the word "right" used in three different senses: as an acknowledgment, as a direction, and as an affirmative answer to a question. Significant differences in intonation for different classes of usage were found, although the differences are not reliable enough to allow systems to use prosody alone to distinguish between usages. These results suggest that pitch change as reported by a pitch tracker could serve as a confirming cue when analyzing ambiguous speech recognizer output, or could serve as input to a probabilistic parser to aid in disambiguating senses of homonyms.