Loredana SCHETTINO | Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (original) (raw)

Papers by Loredana SCHETTINO

Research paper thumbnail of Human, All Too Human

Investigating the multimodal communication of Tourist Guides to implement a Virtual Tourist Guide... more Investigating the multimodal communication of Tourist Guides to implement a Virtual Tourist Guide leading tourists in three Italian Charterhouses, the paper focuses on an aspect of the human guide's speech that would be useful to create a very realistic Virtual Guide: linguistic disfluencies. On a corpus of three guided tours in S. Martino Charterhouse (Naples) an analysis is presented of the guides' pauses and their concomitant gestures.

Research paper thumbnail of Though this Be Hesitant, Yet There is Method in ’T: Disfluencies in Neural Speech Synthesis

Social Science Research Network, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Though this Be Hesitant, Yet There is Method in ’T: Disfluencies in Neural Speech Synthesis

Research paper thumbnail of Though this be hesitant, yet there is method in ’t: Effects of disfluency patterns in neural speech synthesis for cultural heritage presentations

Computer Speech & Language

Research paper thumbnail of Segnali discorsivi in italiano. Funzioni e posizioni

Cuadernos de Filología Italiana

In questo contributo si esaminano le posizioni occupate dai segnali discorsivi rispetto alle funz... more In questo contributo si esaminano le posizioni occupate dai segnali discorsivi rispetto alle funzioni che svolgono, prendendo in esame un corpus di testi orali e un corpus di testi scritti prodotti nell’ambito dei beni culturali. Le unità considerate per esaminare la posizione sono state determinate seguendo criteri intonativi e criteri sintattici. La distribuzione delle posizioni è stata poi analizzata rispetto alle funzioni, con lo scopo di determinare eventuali correlazioni o preferenze. Dai risultati emerge un quadro complesso, nel quale si confermano alcune preferenze tra funzioni e posizioni già indicate in letteratura, ma soprattutto si evince che la presunta generale preferenza per le periferie non è, nel corpus considerato, affatto confermata. Confrontando i nostri dati con studi precedenti su altri tipi di parlato, possiamo concludere che il carattere di monologicità vs. dialogicità è un parametro determinante nella configurazione del rapporto tra funzioni e posizioni dei ...

Research paper thumbnail of Disfluency and speech management in Italian patients with early-stage Parkinson's Disease

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Prolongation in Italian

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Cultural differences of gaps and overlapping speech in political interviews

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Phonetic and functional features of pauses, and concurrent gestures, in tourist guides’ speech

Officinaventuno eBooks, 2019

Phonetic and functional features of pauses, and concurrent gestures, in tourist guides' speech 1 ... more Phonetic and functional features of pauses, and concurrent gestures, in tourist guides' speech 1 This study falls into the bigger framework of the CHROME project, addressing the definition and testing of a methodology of collecting, analyzing and modeling multimodal data for the design of virtual agents serving in museums. The paper analyses three tourist guides' speech, focusing on silent pauses and voiced pauses (filled pauses and segmental prolongations). In this regard, a description of phonetic-acoustic and functional features of pauses and a classification of concomitant gestures have been performed. Results show a) speakers' idiosyncratic linguistic behaviours; b) a clear distinction between silent pauses, mainly used for grammatical and intentional reasons, and voiced pauses that instead occur as ungrammatical and hesitation devices; c) such a distinction is confirmed by concomitant gestures, they are semantically loaded in silent pauses and semantically empty in voiced pauses.

Research paper thumbnail of Gestures and pauses to help thought: hands, voice, and silence in the tourist guide’s speech

Research paper thumbnail of Lexicalized pauses in Italian

Proceedings of International Conferences of Experimental Linguistics

Research paper thumbnail of Do You Have any Recommendation? An Annotation System for the Seekers’ Strategies in Recommendation Dialogues

Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used ... more The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used by human speakers. In the context of recommendation dialogue systems some researchers have investigated the sociable recommendation strategies employed by the Recommenders in natural settings to make successful and persuasive recommendations (Hayati et al., 2020, INSPIRED corpus). However, the Seeker's contribution, as well as the Recommender's, shapes the development of the communicative exchange, in that the Seekers may use specific strategies to disclose their preferences and reach their goal. So, modelling the Seeker's communicative strategies along with the ones used by the Recommender may improve the efficiency of recommendation dialogue systems. In this work, we provide a reliable tagset for the Seekers utterances present in the Inspired dataset, defining a set of communicative strategies coherent with the already existing one for the Recommenders.

Research paper thumbnail of Strategie pragmatiche di gestione di un Discourse Topic in dialoghi task-oriented. Una prospettiva interlinguistica

Research paper thumbnail of Pitch and Functional Characterization of Hesitation Phenomena in Italian Discourse

Schettino L, Betz S, Cutugno F, Wagner P. Pitch and functional characterization of hesitation phe... more Schettino L, Betz S, Cutugno F, Wagner P. Pitch and functional characterization of hesitation phenomena in Italian discourse. Presented at the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe, Barcelona, Spain

Research paper thumbnail of A Crosslinguistic Study on the Interplay of Fillers and Silences

We present a crosslinguistic study on the interplay of hesitation silences and fillers in convers... more We present a crosslinguistic study on the interplay of hesitation silences and fillers in conversation. The research questions have been addressed for English in a previous DiSS workshop paper (Betz & Kosmala, 2019) and this study extends the analysis to German, Italian and French. The research questions are: 1) Does the type of the filler influence following silence duration 2) Does the duration of the filler correlate with silence duration 3) Does silence duration vary depending on its distance from filler. The analysis shows cross-linguistic similarities and differences, thus highlighting the role and the language- and culture-specific nature of disfluencies.

Research paper thumbnail of Sentence topics in Italian: an analysis on the Chrome corpus

The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guide... more The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guides’ speech. We focus on syntactic features, phrase structure, function and weight, and pragmatic aspects, discourse role and givenness. Specifically, tonal events, i.e. accents and boundaries, phonetic phrasing, and disfluency phenomena were investigated. Results show that both syntactic and pragmatic factors play a role in the phonetic realization of topics, though they act at different levels. In particular, disfluencies are found to be affected by syntactic weight and givenness, while tonal events seem to depend mainly on the discourse role. Deaccented realizations are possible as well, but only for given topical entities

Research paper thumbnail of Hesitations Distribution in Italian Discourse

The acknowledgment of the functional role of hesitations in speech has increased the research int... more The acknowledgment of the functional role of hesitations in speech has increased the research interest in investigating and modeling their occurrence in discourse. This study explores hesitation combinations and distribution in Italian discourse. Though clusters represent less frequent occurrences than standalone hesitations, it is still worth examining their composition, distribution, and context of occurrence for a better understanding of hesitations' role in discourse. Also, the emerging patterns may provide interesting findings for technological applications, such as integrating hesitations models in conversational agents' production to improve their communicative efficiency and naturalness.

Research paper thumbnail of Do You Have Any Recommendation? An Annotation System For The Seekers' Strategies In Recommendation Dialogues

The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used ... more The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used by human speakers. In the context of recommendation dialogue systems some researchers have investigated the sociable recommendation strategies employed by the Recommenders in natural settings to make successful and persuasive recommendations (Hayati et al., 2020, INSPIRED corpus). However, the Seeker’s contribution, as well as the Recommender’s, shapes the development of the communicative exchange, in that the Seekers may use specific strategies to disclose their preferences and reach their goal. So, modelling the Seeker’s communicative strategies along with the ones used by the Recommender may improve the efficiency of recommendation dialogue systems. In this work, we provide a reliable tagset for the Seekers utterances present in the Inspired dataset, defining a set of communicative strategies coherent with the already existing one for the Recommenders.

Research paper thumbnail of P3 - Corpus CHROME: la codifica multilivello di un corpus audiovisivo

Abstract: "Il presente lavoro si propone di descrivere la metodologia impiegata per la racco... more Abstract: "Il presente lavoro si propone di descrivere la metodologia impiegata per la raccolta e l'annotazione multilivello di una risorsa sviluppata all'interno del progetto CHROME (Cultural Heritage Resources Orienting Multimodal Experience), volto alla tutela e alla promozione del patrimonio culturale. In relazione agli obiettivi linguistici, scopo ultimo del progetto è la modellizzazione di un agente virtuale capace di comunicare in maniera non solo intellegibile, ma anche efficace e naturale. La risorsa è costituita da due corpora, uno di testi scritti e uno di testi orali. La nostra indagine si incentra sul corpus orale, costituito da registrazioni audio-video di tre guide museali esperte che accompagnano gruppi di visitatori all'interno della certosa di San Martino a Napoli, in un percorso articolato in punti di interesse stabiliti in virtù del loro valenza storico-artistica. In relazione al tipo testuale, il parlato oggetto di studio è definibile come semi-...

Research paper thumbnail of Strategie discorsive in spagnolo L1 ed L2 a confronto: un’indagine su corpora dialogici

CHIMERA: Revista de Corpus de Lenguas Romances y Estudios Lingüísticos, Oct 10, 2018

According to previous studies on L1 Italian and Spanish, speakers prefer different pragmatic stra... more According to previous studies on L1 Italian and Spanish, speakers prefer different pragmatic strategies and adopt specific pragmatic patterns to express their attention to the interlocutor. This study deals with communicative strategies used in dialogic speech in L1 and L2 Spanish considering both textual structure and interaction between the two interlocutors. More in detail, the aim of this research is to analyse how speakers introduce and manage Discourse Topics in order to compare the behaviour of native and non-native Spanish speakers. The study examines two corpora of task-oriented dialogues, the corpus DiESPA, of Peninsular Spanish L1 −collected in different geographic areas− and the corpus DiELE-(I), of Spanish L2-collected in the University of Salerno with Italian learners of a CEFR level B2-C1. The analysis of Discourse Topics introduction and management allows defining crucial textual characteristics and defining speakers' attitudes towards interlocutors. From a qualitative and a quantitative analysis, which examines the percentage of occurrences of pragmatic moves used by native and non-native speakers, it emerges that differences in native speakers and L2 learners' strategic choices used to complete the task are due to their limited linguistic competence, especially grammatical and lexical, rather than to pragmatic and cultural factors.

Research paper thumbnail of Human, All Too Human

Investigating the multimodal communication of Tourist Guides to implement a Virtual Tourist Guide... more Investigating the multimodal communication of Tourist Guides to implement a Virtual Tourist Guide leading tourists in three Italian Charterhouses, the paper focuses on an aspect of the human guide's speech that would be useful to create a very realistic Virtual Guide: linguistic disfluencies. On a corpus of three guided tours in S. Martino Charterhouse (Naples) an analysis is presented of the guides' pauses and their concomitant gestures.

Research paper thumbnail of Though this Be Hesitant, Yet There is Method in ’T: Disfluencies in Neural Speech Synthesis

Social Science Research Network, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Though this Be Hesitant, Yet There is Method in ’T: Disfluencies in Neural Speech Synthesis

Research paper thumbnail of Though this be hesitant, yet there is method in ’t: Effects of disfluency patterns in neural speech synthesis for cultural heritage presentations

Computer Speech & Language

Research paper thumbnail of Segnali discorsivi in italiano. Funzioni e posizioni

Cuadernos de Filología Italiana

In questo contributo si esaminano le posizioni occupate dai segnali discorsivi rispetto alle funz... more In questo contributo si esaminano le posizioni occupate dai segnali discorsivi rispetto alle funzioni che svolgono, prendendo in esame un corpus di testi orali e un corpus di testi scritti prodotti nell’ambito dei beni culturali. Le unità considerate per esaminare la posizione sono state determinate seguendo criteri intonativi e criteri sintattici. La distribuzione delle posizioni è stata poi analizzata rispetto alle funzioni, con lo scopo di determinare eventuali correlazioni o preferenze. Dai risultati emerge un quadro complesso, nel quale si confermano alcune preferenze tra funzioni e posizioni già indicate in letteratura, ma soprattutto si evince che la presunta generale preferenza per le periferie non è, nel corpus considerato, affatto confermata. Confrontando i nostri dati con studi precedenti su altri tipi di parlato, possiamo concludere che il carattere di monologicità vs. dialogicità è un parametro determinante nella configurazione del rapporto tra funzioni e posizioni dei ...

Research paper thumbnail of Disfluency and speech management in Italian patients with early-stage Parkinson's Disease

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Prolongation in Italian

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Cultural differences of gaps and overlapping speech in political interviews

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Phonetic and functional features of pauses, and concurrent gestures, in tourist guides’ speech

Officinaventuno eBooks, 2019

Phonetic and functional features of pauses, and concurrent gestures, in tourist guides' speech 1 ... more Phonetic and functional features of pauses, and concurrent gestures, in tourist guides' speech 1 This study falls into the bigger framework of the CHROME project, addressing the definition and testing of a methodology of collecting, analyzing and modeling multimodal data for the design of virtual agents serving in museums. The paper analyses three tourist guides' speech, focusing on silent pauses and voiced pauses (filled pauses and segmental prolongations). In this regard, a description of phonetic-acoustic and functional features of pauses and a classification of concomitant gestures have been performed. Results show a) speakers' idiosyncratic linguistic behaviours; b) a clear distinction between silent pauses, mainly used for grammatical and intentional reasons, and voiced pauses that instead occur as ungrammatical and hesitation devices; c) such a distinction is confirmed by concomitant gestures, they are semantically loaded in silent pauses and semantically empty in voiced pauses.

Research paper thumbnail of Gestures and pauses to help thought: hands, voice, and silence in the tourist guide’s speech

Research paper thumbnail of Lexicalized pauses in Italian

Proceedings of International Conferences of Experimental Linguistics

Research paper thumbnail of Do You Have any Recommendation? An Annotation System for the Seekers’ Strategies in Recommendation Dialogues

Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used ... more The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used by human speakers. In the context of recommendation dialogue systems some researchers have investigated the sociable recommendation strategies employed by the Recommenders in natural settings to make successful and persuasive recommendations (Hayati et al., 2020, INSPIRED corpus). However, the Seeker's contribution, as well as the Recommender's, shapes the development of the communicative exchange, in that the Seekers may use specific strategies to disclose their preferences and reach their goal. So, modelling the Seeker's communicative strategies along with the ones used by the Recommender may improve the efficiency of recommendation dialogue systems. In this work, we provide a reliable tagset for the Seekers utterances present in the Inspired dataset, defining a set of communicative strategies coherent with the already existing one for the Recommenders.

Research paper thumbnail of Strategie pragmatiche di gestione di un Discourse Topic in dialoghi task-oriented. Una prospettiva interlinguistica

Research paper thumbnail of Pitch and Functional Characterization of Hesitation Phenomena in Italian Discourse

Schettino L, Betz S, Cutugno F, Wagner P. Pitch and functional characterization of hesitation phe... more Schettino L, Betz S, Cutugno F, Wagner P. Pitch and functional characterization of hesitation phenomena in Italian discourse. Presented at the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe, Barcelona, Spain

Research paper thumbnail of A Crosslinguistic Study on the Interplay of Fillers and Silences

We present a crosslinguistic study on the interplay of hesitation silences and fillers in convers... more We present a crosslinguistic study on the interplay of hesitation silences and fillers in conversation. The research questions have been addressed for English in a previous DiSS workshop paper (Betz & Kosmala, 2019) and this study extends the analysis to German, Italian and French. The research questions are: 1) Does the type of the filler influence following silence duration 2) Does the duration of the filler correlate with silence duration 3) Does silence duration vary depending on its distance from filler. The analysis shows cross-linguistic similarities and differences, thus highlighting the role and the language- and culture-specific nature of disfluencies.

Research paper thumbnail of Sentence topics in Italian: an analysis on the Chrome corpus

The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guide... more The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guides’ speech. We focus on syntactic features, phrase structure, function and weight, and pragmatic aspects, discourse role and givenness. Specifically, tonal events, i.e. accents and boundaries, phonetic phrasing, and disfluency phenomena were investigated. Results show that both syntactic and pragmatic factors play a role in the phonetic realization of topics, though they act at different levels. In particular, disfluencies are found to be affected by syntactic weight and givenness, while tonal events seem to depend mainly on the discourse role. Deaccented realizations are possible as well, but only for given topical entities

Research paper thumbnail of Hesitations Distribution in Italian Discourse

The acknowledgment of the functional role of hesitations in speech has increased the research int... more The acknowledgment of the functional role of hesitations in speech has increased the research interest in investigating and modeling their occurrence in discourse. This study explores hesitation combinations and distribution in Italian discourse. Though clusters represent less frequent occurrences than standalone hesitations, it is still worth examining their composition, distribution, and context of occurrence for a better understanding of hesitations' role in discourse. Also, the emerging patterns may provide interesting findings for technological applications, such as integrating hesitations models in conversational agents' production to improve their communicative efficiency and naturalness.

Research paper thumbnail of Do You Have Any Recommendation? An Annotation System For The Seekers' Strategies In Recommendation Dialogues

The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used ... more The development of dialogue systems benefits from the study of the communication strategies used by human speakers. In the context of recommendation dialogue systems some researchers have investigated the sociable recommendation strategies employed by the Recommenders in natural settings to make successful and persuasive recommendations (Hayati et al., 2020, INSPIRED corpus). However, the Seeker’s contribution, as well as the Recommender’s, shapes the development of the communicative exchange, in that the Seekers may use specific strategies to disclose their preferences and reach their goal. So, modelling the Seeker’s communicative strategies along with the ones used by the Recommender may improve the efficiency of recommendation dialogue systems. In this work, we provide a reliable tagset for the Seekers utterances present in the Inspired dataset, defining a set of communicative strategies coherent with the already existing one for the Recommenders.

Research paper thumbnail of P3 - Corpus CHROME: la codifica multilivello di un corpus audiovisivo

Abstract: "Il presente lavoro si propone di descrivere la metodologia impiegata per la racco... more Abstract: "Il presente lavoro si propone di descrivere la metodologia impiegata per la raccolta e l'annotazione multilivello di una risorsa sviluppata all'interno del progetto CHROME (Cultural Heritage Resources Orienting Multimodal Experience), volto alla tutela e alla promozione del patrimonio culturale. In relazione agli obiettivi linguistici, scopo ultimo del progetto è la modellizzazione di un agente virtuale capace di comunicare in maniera non solo intellegibile, ma anche efficace e naturale. La risorsa è costituita da due corpora, uno di testi scritti e uno di testi orali. La nostra indagine si incentra sul corpus orale, costituito da registrazioni audio-video di tre guide museali esperte che accompagnano gruppi di visitatori all'interno della certosa di San Martino a Napoli, in un percorso articolato in punti di interesse stabiliti in virtù del loro valenza storico-artistica. In relazione al tipo testuale, il parlato oggetto di studio è definibile come semi-...

Research paper thumbnail of Strategie discorsive in spagnolo L1 ed L2 a confronto: un’indagine su corpora dialogici

CHIMERA: Revista de Corpus de Lenguas Romances y Estudios Lingüísticos, Oct 10, 2018

According to previous studies on L1 Italian and Spanish, speakers prefer different pragmatic stra... more According to previous studies on L1 Italian and Spanish, speakers prefer different pragmatic strategies and adopt specific pragmatic patterns to express their attention to the interlocutor. This study deals with communicative strategies used in dialogic speech in L1 and L2 Spanish considering both textual structure and interaction between the two interlocutors. More in detail, the aim of this research is to analyse how speakers introduce and manage Discourse Topics in order to compare the behaviour of native and non-native Spanish speakers. The study examines two corpora of task-oriented dialogues, the corpus DiESPA, of Peninsular Spanish L1 −collected in different geographic areas− and the corpus DiELE-(I), of Spanish L2-collected in the University of Salerno with Italian learners of a CEFR level B2-C1. The analysis of Discourse Topics introduction and management allows defining crucial textual characteristics and defining speakers' attitudes towards interlocutors. From a qualitative and a quantitative analysis, which examines the percentage of occurrences of pragmatic moves used by native and non-native speakers, it emerges that differences in native speakers and L2 learners' strategic choices used to complete the task are due to their limited linguistic competence, especially grammatical and lexical, rather than to pragmatic and cultural factors.