• Jens Edlúnd

    KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Dept. of Speech, Music and Hearing

    Jens Edlúnd is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He has studied most aspects of speech technology and spoken interaction, but attempts to maintain a focus on the analysis of human behaviours in face-to-face interactions. Edlund’s work is interdisciplinary, i.e. he received his Master’s in linguistics and phonetics, followed by a PhD in speech communication and a Docent in speech technology. He has paid special attention to the collections of multimodal speech corpora, capturing, for example, voice, video, motion, and bio-signals such as breath. He is currently involved in research projects investigating gaze, breath and gesture signals in spoken interaction and their coordination with the speech signal. Edlund divides his work between the analysis of human behaviours in interpersonal (human) interactions, and the investigation of the effects of implementing such behaviours in machines.

    • 09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE: Breathing in interaction between humans and between humans, machines and robots
      In typical everyday life situations, few things require as little thought as breath and breathing. Breathing is a constant, life-sustainable function that we rarely pay any attention to unless we’re short of breath. In the typical case, we likewise pay little explicit attention to the breath of others, unless they show signs of having difficulties with it. Still, there is widespread evidence that we react to breathing, even though we may not be aware of it. And an argument could be made that speech without breathing, such as most synthetic speech in machines and robots, will elicit different reactions from human interlocutors (and possibly from other machines) than speech with breathing.

      I will present a high-level walkthrough of findings, well-grounded or impressionistic, concerning the role of breath and breathing in spoken interaction and perhaps touch on some related phenomena that behave in similar ways.. Examples and comparisons come from face-to-face interaction between humans or humans and robots, as well as from human conversations with disembodied talking machines.
    • 16:10 - 17:10 Pausing, Chair: Jens Edlund
      Hong Zhang:
      The influence of alcohol intoxication on silent pause duration in spontaneous speech

      Jessica Di Napoli:
      Functions of pause in Itaian television news broadcasts

      Liudmila Savinitch:
      Pragmatics of pauses

       
Cookies policy