Fill the silence! Basics for modeling hesitation

Abstract

In order to model hesitations for technical applications such as conversational speech synthesis, it is desirable to understand interactions between individual hesitation markers. In this study, we explore two markers that have been subject to many discussions: silences and fillers. While it is generally acknowledged that fillers occur in two distinct forms, um and uh, it is not agreed on whether these forms systematically influence the length of associated silences. This notion will be investigated on a small dataset of English spontaneous speech data, and the measure of distance between filler and silence will be introduced to the analyses. Results suggest that filler type influences associated silence duration systematically and that silences tend to gravitate towards fillers in utterances, exhibiting systematically lower duration when preceding them. These results provide valuable insights for improving existing hesitation models.