Filled pauses in spontaneous speech

Abstract

Filled pauses as, e.g., uh, eh, signal disfluencies, i.e. hesitations or repairs. They do normally not occur in read speech and were therefore up to now rather seldom investigated: they must, however, be accounted for in the (automatic) processing of spontaneous speech. We present descriptive statistics and the results of an automatic classification of filled pauses in the database of the VERBMOBIL project and discuss the relevancy of different prosodic features for the marking of different types.