Processing ‘yup!’ and other short utterances in interactive speech

The detection of short utterances in conversational or interactive speech is essential to the proper processing of meaning in spoken interaction. Short, simple utterances are extremely common, and because of their highly variable prosody, carry many different forms of subtle interpersonal information. This paper reports on our approach to this problem and describes some corpora we are working with as well as the results of an analysis showing overlapping segments to be significantly different in their prosodic characteristics.