PauseCode: Computational conversation timing analysis

Pauses play a critical role in adding, shifting or contradicting meaning in a conversation. To enable the study and incorporation of this important modality in computational discourse analytic and processing systems, we require extensible open source pause coding systems and associated software libraries. We designed and implemented a coding and visualisation system for pause and overlap detection and analysis, extending existing voicing and silence detection algorithms. Demonstrating the system using the TalkBank CallFriend and CallHome corpora we show how the approach can be used to code many different kinds of pauses and overlaps within and between interlocutors, and calculate the temporal distribution of these different types of pause and overlap. The coding schema is intended to be combined with other speech modalities to provide novel approaches to predicting social cues and markers, useful for designing more naturalistic conversational agents, and in new tools for measuring turn-taking structure of conversation in greater depth and accuracy