Intonation and Information

Discourse and Dialogue

CS359

October 16, 2001

Beyond Contrast

• Specific information conveyed by intonation– New information = H*– Contrastive Information= L+H*

• General, compositional analysis of intonation– Pitch accent– Phrase accent– Boundary tone

Questions

• What sorts of information, extractable by current text analysis, are useful in accent/tune assignment?

• Can contrastive pronouns be unstressed?• Why is relatively little known about H+L* accent?• Synthesis is interesting, but are there systems that make

use of pitch accent, phrasing, etc for recognition? What can they handle? How good are they?

Questions

• How do you evaluate synthesis systems? Speech recognition in general?

• The Bill/He contrasts could be recognized, but there’s nothing in the text or context to signal this. What sort of simple annotation is available to signal these facets?

• How universal/variable are these tune meanings?

Intonation & Information

• Intonational structure– Different domains of interpretation– Different information impact

• Indicates:– What speaker believes in mutually believed– What speaker wants to make mutually believed– How units are grouped for interpretation

Terminology

• Mutual belief:– I believe, You believe, I believe you believe,

You believe I believe, I believe you believe I believe, etc…….

• “Predicated”: – Add THIS to your set of beliefs..

Pitch Accent Meaning: H*

• All pitch accents indicate salience

• Different accents– Different mutual belief, different predication

• H*: New information to be added to beliefs– With: L-L%, “neutral declarative”– With: H-H%, “high-rise”, inform+confirm– With: H-L%: elaboration– Establish information as mutually believed

Pitch Accent Meaning: L*

• Salient, but not new predicated information– With H-H%, yes-no question; confirmation– With L-H%, SHOULD be mutually believed

– Cue phrases: “Now”,”Anyway”• L*: discourse structure, topic change

• H*/complex: Usual semantic meaning

Pitch Accent Meaning: L+H

• Salience of scale: Link to other salient items

• L*+H: Uncertainty – Esp. with respect to scale– Greater pitch range -> Incredulity– “Lack of predication with respect to scale

• L+H*:Salience of scale+new information– Contrastive

Pitch Accent Meaning: H+L

• New information+link by inference to MB

• H*+L:– Pedagogical: Link new to old, instructions– Calling

Phrase Accent Meaning

• H or L over intermediate phrase– Presence or absence of boundary

• H: No boundary, exhaustive list

• L: Boundary, not exhaustive

Boundary Tone Meaning

• Spans entire phrase/utterance

• Discourse segmentation– H%: “continuation-rise”

• Interpret WITH subsequent utterance

• Internal to discourse segment

– L%: Separate interpretation• Likely END discourse segment

Tone, Tune, and Information

• Pitch accents: Salience and information status– H*: New, predicated info– L*: Salience, nothing to add to beliefs

• Phrase accent, boundary tone:– H-,H%: Continuation, forward linkage– L-,L%: Separation, no linkage