On the Role of Discourse Markers in Interactive Spoken Question Answering Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the role of some discourse markers and the vocalic hesitation ""euh"" in a corpus of spoken human utterances collected with the Ritel system, an open domain and spoken dialog system. The frequency and contextual combinatory of classical discourse markers and of the vocalic hesitation have been studied. This analysis pointed out some specificity in terms of combinatory of the analyzed items. The classical discourse markers seem to help initiating larger discursive blocks both at initial and medial positions of the on-going turns. The vocalic hesitation stand also for marking the user's embarrassments and wish to close the dialog.

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