A STUDY ON PROSODY AND DISCOURSE STRUCTURE IN COOPERATIVE DIALOGS

This article describes how well prosodic information correlates with the topic structure of discourse. To investigate this correlation systematically, we first introduce the notion of utterance unit which can be viewed as the basic unit in conversations. We then define four topic boundary classes: topic shift, topic continuation, elaboration, and speech-act continuation. The prosodic parameters - onset fundamental frequency (FO), final FO, and peak FO ratio - are measured at these topic boundaries to show how these prosodic parameters change with the topic structure. Finally, we discuss discourse structure identification via the prosodic parameters.