Abstract
Discovering and quantifying the prosodic signals that help manage turn-taking is difficult, in part because of the limitations of commonly used methods. This paper presents an integrated method that uses both perceptually-based analysis and quantitative analysis. The eight activities involved in the method --- clarification of aims, problem formulation, corpus preparation, feature discovery, feature combination, hypothesis refinement, tuning, and evaluation --- are illustrated using task of finding prosodic cues for back-channel feedback in Arabic.
Special Session on the Prosody of Turn-Taking and Dialog Acts