Exploring the prosody of floor mechanisms in english using the fundamental frequency variation spectrum

A basic requirement for participation in conversation is the ability to jointly manage interaction. Examples of interaction management include indications to acquire, re-acquire, hold, release, and acknowledge floor ownership, and these are often implemented using specialized dialog act (DA) types. In this work, we explore the prosody of one class of such DA types, known as floor mechanisms, using a methodology based on a recently proposed representation of fundamental frequency variation (FFV). Models over the representation illustrate significant differences between floor mechanisms and other dialog act types, and lead to automatic detection accuracies in equal-prior test data of up to 75%. Analysis indicates that FFV modeling offers a useful tool for the discovery of prosodic phenomena which are not explicitly labeled in the audio.