Investigating Disfluencies Contribution to Discourse-Prosody Mistmaches in French Conversations

In conversation, discourse and prosodic units association can be articulated through an interesting range of configurations. The situation in which these units are mismatching is the least studied and understood of these configurations. We make the hypothesis in this paper that disfluencies are a major cause for such mismatches. Our quantitative analysis based on a 8 hour corpus of French conversations manually annotated with disfluencies, discourse units (DU) and prosodic units (PU), confirms that disfluencies do play a major role in PU-DU mismatch but also that other sources should be considered. In the analysis, we also provide some insight about the different types of disfluencies and their frequency in the different DU-PU configurations.