Using Prosodic Clues to Decide When to Produce Back-channel Utterances. Nigel Ward. 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP-96). Abstract: Back-channel feedback is required in order to build spoken dialog systems that are responsive. This paper reports a model of back-channel feedback in Japanese dialog. It turns out that a low pitch region is a good clue that the speaker is ready for back-channel feedback. A rule based on this fact matches corpus data on respondents' production of back-channel feedback. A system based on this rule meets the expectations of live speakers, sometimes well enough to fool them into thinking they are conversing with a human.This paper has been superseded by
Prosodic Features which Cue Back-channel Responses in English and Japanese.
Nigel Ward and Wataru Tsukahara. Journal of Pragmatics, 23, pp 1177--1207, 2000.