Relationship between speaker/listener similarity and information transmission quality in speech communication

Abstract

We investigate the correlation between similarity in speaker characteristics and information transmission quality using a map task dialogue corpus. Similarity between the prosodic features and lexical styles of different speakers are analyzed, and most of these similarity measurements are shown to have significant correlations with information transmission quality as measured by a direction following task. We also combine these similarity measurements using a linear regression prediction model and assess information transmission quality. Prediction scores show a significant 0.37 correlation coefficient between the combined similarity measurement and information transmission quality scores.

Impact of acoustic similarity on efficiency of verbal information transmission via subtle prosodic cues

“…Future research should include more female participants, and should investigate the effect of a mixed-gender voice. 11 Trials in which participant gave an incorrect response or which had more than a 50% loss of eye movement data were also removed from analysis, which ignores 10% of the remaining data. 12 We ignored participants/trials which did not meet both of the thresholds.…”

“…It is important to us because we aim to find a way to predict and achieve (through speech synthesis) high-efficiency speech communication, if subtle prosodic cues cannot significantly influence our comprehension, the idea can hardly be applied. Thus, in previous research we have tried to use speaker selfsimilarity as a predictor of information transmission quality in dialogues [11]. We investigated the relationship between similarity in spectral envelope features, prosodic features and lexical features of speakers and listeners and the quality of information transmission during map task dialogues.…”