KIKUCHI, Hideaki

ISSN：13447262

ISSN：13498290

Outline：In 2002, Maekawa reported the identification of categories of paralinguistic information by subjects. Using Maekawa' s methods, Ariga extracted categories of paralinguistic information from teachers' speech during their teaching behaviors (2008). However, whereas both of the above studies used recordings of spoken examples of paralinguistic categories, speech is continuous in spoken communications. In the present study, subjects were divided into three groups under different conditions and asked to listen for categories of paralinguistic information in continuous speech to determine how such information is recognized by subjects. This revealed clear differences in the recognition of categories of paralinguistic information among the three groups.

ISSN：13428675

Outline：An experiment on impression rating of paralinguistic information was conducted using categories of paralinguistic information expressed by teachers during teaching as speech stimuli. The aim of this study was to determine whether there are differences in the impression ratings of listeners subjected to paralinguistic information conveyed in the spontaneous speech of teachers. The experimental design involved preparing six categories of paralinguistic information as speech stimuli, and recording subject responses to 45 pairs of assessment words. Variability among subjects with regard to their impressions of categories of paralinguistic information was determined to exist.

ISSN：09135707

ISSN：09135707

ISSN：0913-5685

Outline：We propose the phoneme acquisition model that simulates human auditory system that perceives the temporal variations of the speech. Our model is designed to learn values of the acoustic characteristic of a continuous speech and to estimate the number and boundaries of the phoneme categories without using explicit instructions. A purpose of this study is to clarify the role of an Infant-Directed Speech (IDS), that has the high variability. We performed a learning experiment of an Adult Directed Speech (ADS) and IDS using our model and compared the results. As a result, in the accuracy rate of the voiceless stops, IDS is significantly higher than ADS. Accordingly, it is possible that IDS emphasized the acoustic features of unsteady phonemes, and to assist the acquisition.

ISSN：0913-5685

Outline：In this research, we paid attention to impressions of a speaker which is informed by prosody that his or her voice has and make communication smoothly. We aimed to build up a 3-layer model in imitation of the process how we perceive and recognize impressions of a speaker such as feelings and physical conditions. Through this research, we expected to understand the structure of the process indirectly. In this paper, we confirmed the two effects through the model. One result showed relation of information from voices were clearly observable, the second showed expressive voice could be caught.

Outline：Tactile interaction of three 4-month-old infants and their mothers in play situation was observed at home. Playful repetitive arm/leg movements were observed in all mother-infant pairs and their sequential structure was analyzed. Tempo of the repetitive movement decreased with expanding moving arm/leg area of infant. Mother and infants intended to keep and enjoy their play and their interaction through infants' active physical contact and utterance was observed. Sequential features of the repetitive arm/leg movements obtained from this situation imply the importance of the tactile interaction for the early development of communication.

ISSN：09196072

Outline：In this study, we analyzed the change in spoken vocabulary with the level of intimacy. For our experiments, we collected two kinds of dialogue data: the initial meeting dialogue data we called "low intimacy" and that after six months we called "high intimacy". In our experiments, subjects listened to the dialogue of three pairs of speakers, and evaluated their impressions of the manner of speech through a questionnaire. Analyzing the results, for 23 factors we found differences for 7 factors: "Polite", "Powerful", "Cheerful", "Considerate", "Skillful", "Good-volume" and "Clear". Comparing the frequency of words used in low and high intimacy dialogue, we found a high frequency appearance of "desu", "masu" and "hai" forms in the low intimacy dialogues and the use of "un", "kedo", "maji" and "ore" in the high intimacy dialogues.

ISSN：09196072

Outline：In this study, we analyzed the change in spoken vocabulary with the level of intimacy. For our experiments, we collected two kinds of dialogue data: the initial meeting dialogue data we called "low intimacy" and that after six months we called "high intimacy". In our experiments, subjects listened to the dialogue of three pairs of speakers, and evaluated their impressions of the manner of speech through a questionnaire. Analyzing the results, for 23 factors we found differences for 7 factors: "Polite", "Powerful", "Cheerful", "Considerate", "Skillful", "Good-volume" and "Clear". Comparing the frequency of words used in low and high intimacy dialogue, we found a high frequency appearance of "desu", "masu" and "hai" forms in the low intimacy dialogues and the use of "un", "kedo", "maji" and "ore" in the high intimacy dialogues.

ISSN：09196072

Outline：In this study, we analyzed the change in spoken vocabulary with the level of intimacy. For our experiments, we collected two kinds of dialogue data: the initial meeting dialogue data we called "low intimacy" and that after six months we called "high intimacy". In our experiments, subjects listened to the dialogue of three pairs of speakers, and evaluated their impressions of the manner of speech through a questionnaire. Analyzing the results, for 23 factors we found differences for 7 factors: "Polite", "Powerful", "Cheerful", "Considerate", "Skillful", "Good-volume" and "Clear". Comparing the frequency of words used in low and high intimacy dialogue, we found a high frequency appearance of "desu", "masu" and "hai" forms in the low intimacy dialogues and the use of "un", "kedo", "maji" and "ore" in the high intimacy dialogues.

ISSN：09196072

Outline：In this study, we analyzed the change in spoken vocabulary with the level of intimacy. For our experiments, we collected two kinds of dialogue data: the initial meeting dialogue data we called "low intimacy" and that after six months we called "high intimacy". In our experiments, subjects listened to the dialogue of three pairs of speakers, and evaluated their impressions of the manner of speech through a questionnaire. Analyzing the results, for 23 factors we found differences for 7 factors: "Polite", "Powerful", "Cheerful", "Considerate", "Skillful", "Good-volume" and "Clear". Comparing the frequency of words used in low and high intimacy dialogue, we found a high frequency appearance of "desu", "masu" and "hai" forms in the low intimacy dialogues and the use of "un", "kedo", "maji" and "ore" in the high intimacy dialogues.

ISSN：0913-5685

Outline：In this study, we analyzed the change of manner of speech with the level of intimacy. For our experiments, we collected two kinds of dialogue data: the initial meeting dialogue data we called "low intimacy" and that after six months we called "high intimacy". In our experiments, subjects listened to the dialogue of three pairs of speakers, and evaluated their impressions of the manner of speech through a questionnaire. Analyzing the results, we extracted four significant factors: "Liveliness", "Pleasantness", "Fluency" and "Speed". Comparing the factor scores for the low intimacy dialogues with the high intimacy dialogues, we found similar results for different partners in the low intimacy dialogues, butdifferent factor scores for different partners in the high intimacy dialogues. In particular, the fluency score increased in the dialogues after six months.

ISSN：0913-5685

Outline：In this research, we tried to construct an evaluation scale for singing voice of popular music. In this paper, we considered the effectiveness of the scale in amateur singing voice and the factor of evaluation for singing voice. As a result, we constructed the scale with 12 words and confirmed its reliability. And, we found a characteristic factor in singing voice which differs from speaking voice.

ISSN：0913-5685

Outline：In this study, we consider effects of an agent's grasping user features on the user's attachment to the agent. Recently, some previous studies of HAI have researched for about strategies that make users continue to use spoken dialogue systems long period of time. In this research, we suggest a system estimate user's degree of activeness from prosody and accumulate that with a correct label decided from user response as training data for following estimation. Our results show our system performs more stable estimate, and higher estimation accuracy makes users conscious more intense attachment.

ISSN：13428675

Outline：This paper explains the procedure to enhance the expressiveness in acted speech. We designed our own "format of acting script" referring to the theory of drama and created 280 acting scripts. We presented these acting scripts as acting directions to three actresses and collected 840 speech data. For comparison, using typical emotional words as acting directions, we also collected 160 speech data from each actress. Then, we compared tendencies of various features of each data type and each speaker and found that our acting scripts are effective on the enhancement of expressiveness in acted speech psychologically/acoustically.

ISSN：0913-5685

Outline：We aimed at improvement of desire of continuing interaction with a spoken dialogue system through the three cases of construction of spoken dialogue system. System utterances with humor, control of speech rate of system utterances and estimation of user's personality based on user's utterances are effective for improvement of desire of continuing interaction.

ISSN：0913-5685

Outline：In this study, we propose humor generate method for Non-task-oriented Dialogue System using Twitter. We have been aiming to establish the design of dialogue systems with desire of continuing interaction by analyzing the factors to feel, "want to chat with next time". We confirmed dealing humor is valid for desire of continuing interaction. In this paper, we proposes a method which dialogue system can automatically generate humor with knowledge, extract from Twitter as Modifier-Noun pair and Value-Predicate clauses pair. And in Evaluation experiment, We confirmed proposal method can generate humor.

ISSN：1346-0714

Outline：In this study, we aim at clarification of the factor that promotes an user's acceptance of suggestion from an interactive agent in driving environment. Our aim is to figure out how human beings accept the encouragement from interaction objects, and also which kinds of dialogues or action controls are necessary for the design of car navigation system which makes suggestion and requests to drivers. Firstly, we had an experiment for collecting dialogue between humans in driving simulation environment, then we analyzed the drivers' acceptance and evaluation for the navigators. As the results, we found that the presence and reliability of the navigator highly relate to the acceptance of suggestion from the navigator. When navigators were next to drivers, the rate of drivers' suggestion acceptance rose. However, the stress of drivers increased. In addition, based on the linguistic and acoustic analysis of the navigators' utterances, we found out some points of designing system utterance of suggestion to promote user's acceptance. We found that expressing the grounds of suggestions, showing the exact numbers, and the wide pitch ranges, all highly relate to the acceptance of suggestions.

ISSN：1347-7986

Outline：We assume that SOM is adequate as a language acquisition model of the native phonetic system. However, many studies don't consider the quantitative features (the appearance frequency and the number of frames of each phoneme) of the input data. Our model is designed to learn values of the acoustic characteristic of a natural continuous speech and to estimate the number and boundaries of the vowel categories without using explicit instructions. In the simulation trial, we investigate the relationship between the quantity of learning and the accuracy for the vowels in a single Japanese speaker's natural speech. As a result, it is found that the recognition accuracy rate (of our model) are 5% (/u/)-92% (/s/).

ISSN：1340-7619

Outline：Recent developments in computer technology have allowed the construction and widespread application of large-scale speech corpora. To enable users of speech corpora to easier data retrieval, we attempt to characterise the speaking style of speakers recorded in the corpora. We first introduce the three scales for measuring speaking style which were proposed by Eskenazi in 1993. We then use morphological features extracted from speech transcriptions that have proven effective in discriminating between styles and identifying authors in the field of natural language processing to construct an estimation model of speaking style. More specifically, we randomly choose transcriptions from various speech corpora as text stimuli with which to conduct a rating experiment on speaking style perception. Then, using the features extracted from these stimuli and rating results, we construct an estimation model of speaking style, using a multi-regression analysis. After cross-validation (leave-1-out), the results show that among the three scales of speaking style, the ratings of two scales can be estimated with high accuracy, which proves the effectiveness of our method in the estimation of speaking style.

ISSN：2186-4942

Outline：© 2015 ACM.The characteristics of the spoken language used to address infants have been eagerly studied as a part of the language acquisition research. Because of the uncontrollability factor with regard to the infants, the features and roles of infantdirected speech were tried to be revealed by the comparison of speech directed toward infants and that toward other listeners. However, they share few characteristics with infants, while infants have many characteristics which may derive the features of IDS. In this study, to solve this problem, we will introduce a new approach that replaces the infant with an infant-like robot which is designed to control its motions and to imitate its appearance very similar to a real infant. We have now recorded both infant-and infantlike robot-directed speech and are constructing both corpora. Analysis of these corpora is expected to contribute to the studies of infant-directed speech. In this paper, we discuss the contents of this approach and the outline of the corpora.

Outline：© 2015 ACM.We propose a humor utterance generation method that is compatible with dialogue systems, to increase "desire of continuing dialogue". A dialogue system retrieves leading-item: noun pairs from Twitter as knowledge and attempts to select the most humorous reply using word similarity, which reveals that incongruity can be explained by the incongruity-resolution model. We consider the differences among individuals, and confirm the validity of the proposed method. Ex-perimental results indicate that high-incongruity replies are significantly effective against low-incongruity replies with a limited condition.

ISSN：02883635

Outline：© 2017, Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer Japan. A method to assign a personality to a spoken dialogue agent is proposed and evaluated. The proposed method assigns a personality using agent reporting about behavior independent of interaction with a user. The proposed method attempts to assigning complex personalities. For this purpose, we have defined a behavior report dialogue and designed a personality assigning method using behavior reporting. The proposed method consists of three steps: collecting stereotypes between a personality and behavior through a questionnaire, designing the behavior report dialogue from the collected stereotypes, and agent reports about behavior at the start of interactions with a user. Experimental results show that the proposed method can assign a personality by repeating the behavior report dialogue, (the assigned personality is equivalent to the personality determined by the collected stereotypes) and that reporting behavior influences the assigned personality. In addition, we verified that the proposed method can assign “kind”, “judicious” and the five basic personalities defined in the Tokyo University Egogram Second Edition.

ISSN：00100277

Outline：© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Infant-directed speech (IDS) is known to differ from adult-directed speech (ADS) in a number of ways, and it has often been argued that some of these IDS properties facilitate infants’ acquisition of language. An influential study in support of this view is Kuhl et al. (1997), which found that vowels in IDS are produced with expanded first and second formants (F1/F2) on average, indicating that the vowels are acoustically further apart in IDS than in ADS. These results have been interpreted to mean that the way vowels are produced in IDS makes infants’ task of learning vowel categories easier. The present paper revisits this interpretation by means of a thorough analysis of IDS vowels using a large-scale corpus of Japanese natural utterances. We will show that the expansion of F1/F2 values does occur in spontaneous IDS even when the vowels’ prosodic position, lexical pitch accent, and lexical bias are accounted for. When IDS vowels are compared to carefully read speech (CS) by the same mothers, however, larger variability among IDS vowel tokens means that the acoustic distances among vowels are farther apart only in CS, but not in IDS when compared to ADS. Finally, we will show that IDS vowels are significantly more breathy than ADS or CS vowels. Taken together, our results demonstrate that even though expansion of formant values occurs in spontaneous IDS, this expansion cannot be interpreted as an indication that the acoustic distances among vowels are farther apart, as is the case in CS. Instead, we found that IDS vowels are characterized by breathy voice, which has been associated with the communication of emotional affect.

ISBN：4-274-90637-x

ISBN：4-621-07674-4

ISBN：4274207327

ISBN：0935047727

ISBN：4339008104

ISBN：978-4-7813-1430-3