Stefan Benus

INTERSPEECH 2007 Classification of Discourse Functions of Affirmative Words in Spoken Dialogue (2009)

Agustín Gravano, Stefan Benus, Julia Hirschberg, Shira Mitchell, Ilia Vovsha

We present results of a series of machine learning experiments that address the classification of the discourse function of single affirmative cue words such as alright, okay and mm-hm in a spoken...

The Effect of Contour Type and Epistemic Modality on the Assessment of Speaker Certainty (2009)

Agustín Gravano, Stefan Benus, Julia Hirschberg, Elisa Sneed German, Gregory Ward

In an empirical study participants were asked to rate the perceived degree of certainty of utterances that contained either the modal would or main verb be (e.g. That would be me vs. That’s me),...

1. Overview Deriving Consonant Cluster Phonotactics: Evidence from Singapore English (2008)

Arto Anttila, Vivienne Fong, Stefan Benus, Jennifer Nycz, Lisa Davidson, Edward Flemming, ...

Consonant clusters are often targeted by phonological processes that typically make them simpler. 1 This brings up two questions of theoretical interest. First, why do cluster processes occur? One...

INTERSPEECH 2007 Prosody, emotions, and … ‘whatever’ (2008)

Stefan Benus, Agustín Gravano, Julia Hirschberg

We examine the role of prosody in cueing a scale of negative meanings associated with the use of whatever. The analysis of a corpus of elicited examples shows that the more negative the token, the...

INTERSPEECH 2006 Personality Factors in Human Deception Detection: Comparing Human to Machine Performance (2008)

Frank Enos, Stefan Benus, Robin L. Cautin, Martin Graciarena, Julia Hirschberg, Elizabeth Shriberg

Previous studies of human performance in deception detection have found that humans generally are quite poor at this task, comparing unfavorably even to the performance of automated procedures....

INTERSPEECH 2006- ICSLP Personality Factors in Human Deception Detection: Comparing Human to Machine Performance (2008)

Frank Enos, Stefan Benus, Robin L. Cautin, Martin Graciarena, Julia Hirschberg, Elizabeth Shriberg

Previous studies of human performance in deception detection have found that humans generally are quite poor at this task, comparing unfavorably even to the performance of automated procedures....

The prosody of backchannels in American English (2007)

Stefan Benus, Agustín Gravano, Julia Hirschberg

We examine prosodic and contextual factors characterizing the backchannel function of single affirmative words. Data is drawn from collaborative task-oriented dialogues between speakers of Standard...

The prosody of backchannels in American English (2007)

Stefan Benus, Agustín Gravano, Julia Hirschberg

We examine prosodic and contextual factors characterizing the backchannel function of single affirmative words. Data is drawn from collaborative task-oriented dialogues between speakers of Standard...

The role of context and prosody in the interpretation of okay (2007)

Agustín Gravano, Stefan Benus, Héctor Chávez, Julia Hirschberg, Lauren Wilcox

We examine the effect of contextual and acoustic cues in the disambiguation of three discourse-pragmatic functions of the word okay. Results of a perception study show that contextual cues are...

Pauses in deceptive speech (2006)

Stefan Benus, Frank Enos, Julia Hirschberg, Elizabeth Shriberg

We use a corpus of spontaneous interview speech to investigate the relationship between the distributional and prosodic characteristics of silent and filled pauses and the intent of an interviewee to...

Dynamics and transparency in vowel harmony / (2005)

Benus, Stefan.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2005.

Distinguishing Deceptive from Non-Deceptive Speech (2005)

Julia Hirschberg, Stefan Benus, Jason M. Brenier, Frank Enos, Sarah Friedman, Sarah Gilman, ...

To date, studies of deceptive speech have largely been confined to descriptive studies and observations from subjects, researchers, or practitioners, with few empirical studies of the specific...

Qualitative and quantitative aspects of vowel harmony: A dynamics model (2005)

Stefan Benus, Adamantios I. Gafos

A fundamental problem in spoken language is the duality between the continuous aspects of phonetic performance and the discrete aspects of phonological competence. We study a specific instance of...

Distinguishing Deceptive from Non-Deceptive Speech (2005)

Julia Hirschberg, Stefan Benus, Jason M. Brenier, Frank Enos, Sarah Friedman, Sarah Gilman, ...

To date, studies of deceptive speech have largely been confined to descriptive studies and observations from subjects, researchers, or practitioners, with few empirical studies of the specific...

Distinguishing Deceptive from Non-Deceptive Speech (2005)

Julia Hirschberg, Stefan Benus, Jason M. Brenier, Frank Enos, Sarah Friedman, Sarah Gilman, ...

To date, studies of deceptive speech have largely been confined to descriptive studies and observations from subjects, researchers, or practitioners, with few empirical studies of the specific...

Gestural coordination and the distribution of English “geminates (2004)

Stefan Benus, Iris Smorodinsky, Adamantios Gafos

Recent work has argued that phonology includes grammatical principles and representations that refer to the temporal coordination of gestures (Gafos 2001, 2002). In this paper, we extend this line of...

On neutral vowels in Hungarian (2003)

Adamantios Gafos, Stefan Benus

Neutral vowels are vowels that may intervene between the trigger and target of a harmony pattern even when they bear the opposite value for the harmonizing feature. Despite the significant body of...

Phonetics and phonology of transparent vowels in Hungarian (2003)

Stefan Benus, Adamantios Gafos, Louis Goldstein

Vowel harmony is a requirement by which vowels in a certain domain agree in one or more phonetic features. 1 In Hungarian, the feature subject to harmony is the horizontal position of the tongue...