Speech Research Makes Headlines
January 9, 2004
Liz Shriberg, a senior researcher at ICSI, was quoted on January 3, 2004 in a New York Times article about disfluencies in speech. She was subsequently interviewed live on the radio talk show "Adler On Line" with Charles Adler of CJOB 68 Radio in Winnipeg, Canada, on Friday, January 9.
A major focus of Shriberg's speech research is disfluency detection in automatic speech recognition, because, as she says in the NY Times article, "If someday you want machines to be as smart as people, then you have to have machines that understand speech that's natural, and natural speech has lots of disfluencies in it."
In her radio interview, Shriberg discussed the use of disfluencies in television and film - from the over-emphasized slang use of the word "so" in the popular TV series "Friends" to Mamet's films in which "lines are delivered not only without disfluencies, but with a very unnatural robotic-sounding prosody." Prosody is another focus of Shriberg's speech research; much like disfluencies, natural speech contains a lot of prosodic variation. According to Shriberg, the main point she tried to convey during the radio interview was that "disfluencies are part of language: they allow us to cope with the many complex cognitive and discourse-level demands that people need to juggle when speaking."