The proposed project considers research on the hypothesis that disfluencies in spontaneous speech - pauses, repeated words, repairs, filled pauses, word fragments, and elongated segments - are far from random and that knowledge about their regularity would shed light on aspects of human cognition and provide principled methods for dealing with them in spontaneous speech processing. Several relevant disciplines are involved in this effort such as human- computer interaction, linguistics, psycho-linguistics, computational linguistics, prosody, and speech technology. The multi-disciplinary approach includes investigating the forms and distribution of disfluencies across many corpora, conducting perceptual experiments to assess the saliency of specific cues in the signal, and developing and evaluating new methods for automatic processing of speech.
