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Dialogue systems are one of the most interesting applications of speech and language technologies. There have recently been some attempts to build dialogue systems in Spanish, and some corpora have been acquired and annotated. Using these corpora, statistical machine learning methods can be applied to try to solve problems in spoken dialogue systems. In this paper, two statistical models based on the maximum likelihood assumption are presented, and two main applications of these models on a Spanish dialogue corpus are shown: labelling and decoding. The labelling application is useful for annotating new dialogue corpora. The decoding application is useful for implementing dialogue strategies in dialogue systems. Both applications centre on unsegmented dialogue turns. The obtained results show that, although limited, the proposed statistical models are appropriate for these applications. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper deals with the influence of structural and stylistic factors in the retention vs. elision of-Id!- in the Spanish words finished in -ado (termina(d)o, merca(d)o)- in Castellón, a Spanish bilingual community, where the ethnolinguistic background of the speakers has been found decisive in a previous study: the more use and competence in Valenciano (the regional variety of Catalan in the Valencian Community), the more level of retention, and vice versa. In this context, and from a linguistic point of view, the results of our current variationist analysis challenge the traditional association between the variable rule of elisions and some structural factors (i.e. part of speeches and function of the morpheme) and enact the effect of other, like the type of vocabulary and their frequency in ordinary discourse. Besides, we analyze some stylistic parameters which show a complex, and not always expected, influence. Our main conclusion is that the language contact situation conditions this linguistic variable in a structural and stylistic way at least partially different from what we find in other monolingual speech communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous works in English have revealed that disfluencies follow regular patterns and that incorporating them into the language model of a speech recognizer leads to lower perplexities and sometimes to a better performance. Although work on disfluency modeling has been applied outside the English community (e.g., in Japanese), as far as we know there is no specific work dealing with disfluencies in Spanish. In this paper, we follow a data driven approach in exploring the potential benefit of modeling disfluencies in a speech recognizer in Spanish. Two databases of human-computer and human-human dialogs are considered, which allow the absolute and relative frequencies of disfluencies in the two situations to be compared. The rate of disfluencies in human-human dialogs is found to be very close to that found for similar databases in English. Due to setup factors, the rate of disfluencies found in human-computer dialogs was remarkably higher than that reported for similar databases in English. In any case, from the point of view of speech recognition, the high frequencies of disfluencies and the distinct features of the acoustic events related to them support the need for explicit acoustic models. The regularities observed in the distribution of filled pauses and speech repairs reveal that including them in the language model of the speech recognizer may be also helpful. The extent to which the number of events depends on utterance length and on the speaker is also explored. Statistics are shown that follow previous studies for English, and a sizeable space is devoted to comparing our results with them. Finally, various possible cues for the automatic detection of speech repairs—a key issue from the point of view of speech understanding—are explored: silent pauses, filled pauses, lengthenings, cut off words and discourse markers. As previously observed for English, none of them was found to be reliable by itself. More information, especially at the acoustic-prosodic level, is no doubt needed to reliably detect speech repairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an index and commentary to the "Cantigas de escarnio e de mal dizer" (CEM) with particular focus on female speech. Lack of scholarly work done on female speech in Medieval Iberian literature; Survey of women's voices as represented in various literatures; Challenges to assembling a list of female speeches in the CEM; Comments on the index; Remarks on the female monologues, dialogues, other dialogic poems, and female self-citations.