On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of 'okay'

AGUSTÍN GRAVANO; STEFAN BENUS; HÉCTOR CHÁVEZ; JULIA HIRSCHBERG; LAUREN WILCOX

Praga

Congreso; 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007); 2007

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

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 stronger predictors of discourse function than acoustic cues. However, acoustic features capturing the pitch excursion at the right edge of ´okay´ feature prominently in disambiguation, whether other contextual cues are present or not.