Umm... With Transformers? Insights from Filled Pause Use across Four Slavic Parliaments
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Umm... With Transformers? Insights from Filled Pause Use across Four Slavic Parliaments
Abstract:Filled pauses (FPs) are a universal feature of spontaneous speech, yet most studies rely on small, single-language corpora, limiting the generalisability of their findings. We analyse ~4,000 hours of parliamentary speech across four related Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian). FP occurrence is obtained via transformer-based automatic detection, while FP rate is modelled using Generalised Estimating Equations (GEE) with Mundlak correction to distinguish within- from between- speaker effects. We replicate a negative association of age and speech rate with FP rate, but find that gender effects are language-specific and directionally opposite to most prior literature. Novel analyses of sentiment, political orientation, and power status reveal a consistent positive association between sentiment and FP rate, alongside parliament-specific modulation by orientation and power status, with opposition speakers tending toward lower FP rates than governing coalition speakers.
| Comments: | 6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted at InterSpeech 2026. Code published: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Applications (stat.AP) |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7; J.5 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2607.05964 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2607.05964v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.05964
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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