@InProceedings{chowdhury-EtAl:2017:Speech-Centric,
  author    = {Chowdhury, Shammur Absar  and  Stepanov, Evgeny  and  Danieli, Morena  and  Riccardi, Giuseppe},
  title     = {Functions of Silences towards Information Flow in Spoken Conversation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech-Centric Natural Language Processing},
  month     = {September},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {1--9},
  abstract  = {Silence is an integral part of the most frequent turn-taking phenomena in
	spoken conversations.  Silence is sized and placed within the conversation flow
	and it is coordinated by the speakers along with the other speech acts. The
	objective of this analytical study is twofold: to explore the functions of
	silence with duration of one second and above, towards information flow in a
	dyadic conversation utilizing the sequences of dialog acts present in the turns
	surrounding the silence itself; and to design a feature space useful for
	clustering the silences using a hierarchical concept formation algorithm. The
	resulting clusters are manually grouped into functional categories based on
	their similarities. It is observed that the silence plays an important role in
	response preparation, also can indicate speakers' hesitation or indecisiveness.
	It is also observed that sometimes long silences can be used deliberately to
	get a forced response from another speaker thus making silence a
	multi-functional and an important catalyst towards information flow.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-4601}
}