Crosslinguistic Disfluency Modeling: A Comparative Analysis of Swedish and American English Human-Human and Human-Machine Dialogues

Abstract

We report results from a cross-language study of disfluencies (DFs) in Swedish and American English human machine and human-human dialogs. The focus is on comparisons not directly affected by differences in overall rates since these could be associated with task details. Rather, we focus on differences suggestive of how speakers utilize DFs in the different languages, including: relative rates of the use of hesitation forms, the location of hesitations, and surface characteristics of DFs. Results suggest that although the languages differ in some respects (such as the ability to insert filled pauses within `words’), in many analyses the languages show similar behavior. Such results provide suggestions for cross-linguistic DF modeling in both theoretical and applied fields.