Audiovisual prosody of uncertainty: An overview

Abstract

The goal of this work is to give an overview of research conducted in the field of audiovisual prosody and uncertainty. We refer to previous studies investigating the relevance of prosodic cues for both the production and perception of uncertainty in natural conversation. Afterwards, we present our own experiments dealing with the role of prosodic cues of uncertainty and also of context for pragmatic focus interpretation. In a next step we discuss which role uncertainty plays for human-machine communication. In this context we summarise our own studies on the modelling and perception of uncertainty in speech from an articulatory speech synthesizer. We assume that speech synthesis systems with highly variable speech can help to improve human-machine communication.

Keywords

• uncertainty
• audiovisual prosody
• context
• focus interpretation
• exhaustivity
• speech synthesis