Abstract
Hot-spot words are indicators of high emotional invovement of speakers in the conversation and contain cues to the emotional state of the speaker. Understanding and modeling of these cues may improve the effec-tiveness and naturalness of automated cross-modal dialogue systems. In this paper we investigate the relationship between prosody and emotions in a subgroup of hot-spot words: non-verbal vocal gestures with a problematic textual representation. We extracted these gestures from a recording of a puppet play and argue that this corpus is well suited for investigating emotional speech. We identify the expressive load of non-verbal vocal gestures in Slovak and report on multiple ambiguities in their emotional and discourse functions. The relationship between prosody and emotions in non-verbal hot-spot words is very complex and a ToBI-based framework of discrete representation of prosody is useful but not sufficient for modeling this relationship.
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Beňuš, Š., Rusko, M. (2009). Vocal Gestures in Slovak: Emotions and Prosody. In: Esposito, A., Hussain, A., Marinaro, M., Martone, R. (eds) Multimodal Signals: Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5398. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00525-1_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00525-1_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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