Mhm... Yeah? Okay! Evaluating the Naturalness and Communicative Function of Synthesized Feedback Responses in Spoken Dialogue

Carol Figueroa, Marcel de Korte, Magalie Ochs, Gabriel Skantze


Abstract
To create conversational systems with human-like listener behavior, generating short feedback responses (e.g., “mhm”, “ah”, “wow”) appropriate for their context is crucial. These responses convey their communicative function through their lexical form and their prosodic realization. In this paper, we transplant the prosody of feedback responses from human-human U.S. English telephone conversations to a target speaker using two synthesis techniques (TTS and signal processing). Our evaluation focuses on perceived naturalness, contextual appropriateness and preservation of communicative function. Results indicate TTS-generated feedback were perceived as more natural than signal-processing-based feedback, with no significant difference in appropriateness. However, the TTS did not consistently convey the communicative function of the original feedback.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.46
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
544–553
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.46
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.46
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carol Figueroa, Marcel de Korte, Magalie Ochs, and Gabriel Skantze. 2024. Mhm... Yeah? Okay! Evaluating the Naturalness and Communicative Function of Synthesized Feedback Responses in Spoken Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 544–553, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mhm… Yeah? Okay! Evaluating the Naturalness and Communicative Function of Synthesized Feedback Responses in Spoken Dialogue (Figueroa et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.46.pdf