on the basis of a Knowledge Model
Satoshi KINSUI, Toshiyuki SADANOBU
Faculty of Letters, Kobe University
Nada-ku, Hyogo, 657, Japan
e-mail: kinsui@icluna.kobe-u.ac.jp
We examine the discourse management function of Japanese Response Markers -- interjections, sentence-final particles, yes-no words etc. -- which have been so far regarded as noises for the spoken dialogue processing. For this purpose, we posit a cognitive interface between language and knowledge-base. This interface contains pointers or indices which control the access paths to the knowledge-base and the temporary memory-base set up for each dialogue session. Utterances in a dialogue can be seen as instructions for operations on this interface: registering, searching, copying, and inferring. We examine the nature of these operations by analyzing various discourse particles and interjections, which, we claim, work as mental monitoring devices for these operations. In this year, we conducted the following operations:
1) construction of a database of response markers with intonation extracted from TV plays.
2) examination of sentence-final particle "NE".
3) examination of fillers "anoo" and "eeto".
Keywords: response markers, discourse management, sentence-final particles, fillers