Lexico-prosodic anomalies in dialog

Abstract

In dialog, most words fit nicely with their prosodic context. This enables the prediction of which words are likely to come next, given the recent prosodic context, an ability which is of practical utility. However anomalies exist, cases where the word that comes next seems to be a mismatch for its prosodic context. Examination of 60 such lexico-prosodic anomalies in the Switchboard telephone dialog corpus revealed some patterns: anomalies tend to occur with, or perhaps constitute, bids for dominance, expressions of emotion, idiosyncratic speech patterns, and prosodic amalgams.