Pauses delimiting semantic boundaries

This paper deals with speech pauses marking clause boundaries and the gestures which co-occur with them in an audio- and video-recorded corpus of first encounters. The paper also investigates whether information about gestures co-occurring with speech contributes to the automatic prediction of the clause boundary pauses. Since one clause corresponds to one or more semantic units (dialog acts) the pauses investigated mark the start and end of large semantic units. The results of my study indicate that pauses that mark clause boundaries, co-occur with all gesture types in the analyzed corpus. Finally, my automatic prediction experiments show that information about speech tokens preceding the pauses can predict their function as clause boundary markers with high precision and recall, while information about the gestures co-occurring with speech (head movements, facial expressions, and body postures) does not contribute to the prediction.