Štefan Beňuš

sbenus@ukf.skMy name in IPA: [ʃcɛfɑn bɛɲuʃ]
  • RESEARCH:
  • relationship between speech prosody and pragmatic/discourse aspect of the message, turn-taking, discourse markers, etc.
  • alignment/entrainment between interlocutors
  • relationship between phonetics and phonology with a special interest in the articulatory characteristics of speech
  • applications to foreign language acquisition & teaching and speech processing (synthesis, recognition, dialogue systems)

 

  • Selected recent publications below and citations (Google Scholar)
  • Complete publications in CV (in pdf)
  • CURRENT POSITIONS:
  • Full Professor
    Constantine the Philosopher University, Faculty of Arts
    Dept. of English and American Studies
    Stefanikova 67
    94974 NITRA, Slovakia

 

  • Research scientist:
    Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Informatics
    Dept. of Speech Analysis and Synthesis
    Dubravska cesta 9
    845 07 BRATISLAVA, Slovakia

PAST POSITIONS:

2009-10 post-doc researcher (Humboldt Fellowship) Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU Munich, Germany
2006-7 visiting professor Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, USA
2005-6 post-doc research scientist Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, USA
1998-2005 PhD student Linguistics department, New York University
Dissertation: Dynamics and Transparency in Vowel Harmony, Advisor: Adamantios I. Gafos

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Beňuš, Š. (2021). Investigating Spoken English: A Practical Guide to Phonetics and Phonology Using Praat. Palgrave MacMillan, 272 p., ISBN: 978-3-030-54348-8.
Cover for The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody Hirschberg, J., Beňuš, Š., Gravano, A., Levitan, R. (2020). Prosody in discourse and speaker state. In Gussenhoven, Carlos and Chen, Aoju (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody. Oxford University Press, pp. 468-476.

Karpinsky, M., Andreeva, B., Asu, E. L., Daugavet, A., Beňuš, Š., Mády, K. (2020). Central and Eastern Europe. In Gussenhoven, Carlos and Chen, Aoju (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody. Oxford University Press, pp. 225-235.

 

Recent journal publications [email me sbenus@ukf.sk if you cannot access the paper and a pre-print is not available]

2024 Mareková, L.,Beňuš, Š. (2024). Speech fluency production and perception in L1 (Slovak) and L2 (English) read speech. Language and Speech.

Kejriwal, J., Mishra, C., Skantze, G., Offrede, T., Beňuš, Š. (2024). Does a Robot’s Gaze Behavior Affect Entrainment in HRI?. Computing and Informatics, 43(5), 1256–1284.

Sabo, R., Beňuš, Š., , Kevická, V., Trnka, M., Rusko, M., Darjaa, S. & Kejriwal, J. (2024). Towards the Use of Social Robot Furhat and Generative AI in Testing Cognitive Abilities. Human Affairs, 34(2), 224-243.

2023 Kruyt, J., de Jong, D., D’Ausilio, A., Beňuš, Š. (2023). Measuring Prosodic Entrainment in Conversation: A Review and Comparison of Different Methods. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 66(11), 4280-4314.
2021 Kruyt, J., Beňuš, Š. (2021). Prosodic entrainment in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Topics in Linguistic 22(2), 47-61.

Sabo, R., Beňuš, Š., Trnka, M., Ritomský, M., Rusko, M., Schaper, M., Szabo, J. (2021). Database of Speech under Stress in Slovak. Jazykovedný časopis 72 (2), 579-589.

2020 Mareková, L., Beňuš, Š. (2020). Slovak ‘no’ and its pragmatic meanings and functions in relation to prosody. Topics in Linguistics 21(1), 1-14.

Gálvez, R., Gravano, A., Beňuš, Š., Levitan, R., Trnka, M., Hirschberg, J. (2020). An empirical study of the effect of acoustic-prosodic entrainment on the perceived trustworthiness of conversational avatars. Speech Communication 124, 46-67.

Brusco, P., Vidal, J., Beňuš, Š., Gravano, A. (2000). A cross-linguistic analysis of the temporal dynamics of turn-taking cues using machine learning as a descriptive tool. Speech Communication 125, 24-40.

2018 Reichel, U., Beňuš, Š., Mády, K. (2018). Entrainment profiles: Comparison by gender, role, and feature set. Speech Communication 100, 46-57. The paper is available here, the accepted manuscript is available here.

 

Recent conference publications [email me sbenus@ukf.sk if you cannot access the paper]

2024 Kruyt, J., Polónyiová, K., Sabo, R., Ostatníková, D., Beňuš, Š. (2024). The Slovak Autistic and Non-Autistic Child Speech Corpus: Task-Oriented Child-Adult Interactions. Proceedings, of LREC-COLING 2024, Torino, Italy, 16094–16099.

Yuan Z., de Jong D., Beňuš Š., Nguyen N., Feng R., Sabo R., Fadiga L., D’Ausilio A. (2024). ART: The Alternating Reading Task Corpus for Speech Entrainment and Imitation. Proceedings, of LREC-COLING 2024, Torino, Italy, 1548 – 1562.

Mareková L., Beňuš Š. (2024). Task complexity and pausing behavior in L1 and L2 task-oriented dialogues. In. ed. Yiya Chen, Aoju Chen and Amalia Arvaniti, Speech Prosody 2024: Proceedings from 13th International Conference, Leiden, The Netherlands. Boston : International Science Community Association, ISSN 2333-2042, pp. 517-521.

2023 Kejriwal, J., Beňuš, Š., Rojas-Barahona, L.M. (2023). Unsupervised Auditory and Semantic Entrainment Models with Deep Neural Networks. INTERSPEECH 2023, Dublin, Ireland, 2628-2632.

Kejriwal, J., Beňuš, Š. (2023). Relationship between auditory and semantic entrainment using Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Proc. INTERSPEECH 2023, Dublin, Ireland, 2623-2627.

Mareková, L., Kruyt, J., Beňuš, Š. (2023). The effect of (non-)native language and task complexity on speech entrainment. 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Aug 2023, Prague, Czech Republic, 1548-1552.

Figueroa, C., Beňuš, Š., Skantze, G. (2023). Prosodic Alignment in Different Conversational Feedback Functions. 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Aug 2023, Prague, Czech Republic, 1514-1518.

Kruyt, J., Polónyiová, K., Ostatníková, D., Beňuš, Š. (2023). Lexical entrainment on target words during task-oriented interaction in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Proceedings of the 27th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Aug 2023, Maribor, Slovenia, 6-14. Andy Lücking, Chiara Mazzocconi & Darinka Verdonik (eds.), ISSN 2308-2275.

Kruyt, J., Polónyiová, K., Ostatníková, D., Beňuš, Š. (2023). Global and local prosodic entrainment in a task-oriented interaction in autistic and neurotypical children. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Connecting Multiple Disciplines to AI Techniques in Interaction-centric Autism Research and Diagnosis (ICARD 2023), pages 1–11, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Kejriwal J., Beňuš Š. (2023). Speech entrainment and emotion. 14th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, CogInfoCom, 99 – 104.

2022 Beňuš, Š. (2022). Prosodic imitation of audiovisual and audio-only prompts in L2 English. Proc. Speech Prosody 2022, 787-791. [doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-160].

Kruyt, J., Beňuš, Š., Faget, C., Lancon, Ch., Champagne-Lavau, M. (2022). Prosodic and lexical entrainment in adults with and without schizophrenia. Proc. Speech Prosody 2022, 125-129. [doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-26].

Kejriwal, J., Beňuš, Š., Trnka, M. (2022). Stress detection using non-semantic speech representation. 32nd International Conference RADIOELEKTRONIKA, 1-5. [doi: 10.1109/RADIOELEKTRONIKA54537.2022.9764916].

2019 Suni, A., Kallio, H., Beňuš, Š., Šimko, J. (2019). Characterizing second language fluency with global wavelet spectrum. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia. Calhoun, S., Escudero, P., Tabain, M. & Warren, P. (eds.). Canberra: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., p. 1947-1951.

Heldner, M., Włodarczak, M., Beňuš, Š., Gravano, A. (2019). Voice Quality as a Turn-Taking Cue. In: Proceedings of INTERSPEECH, pp. 4165–4169. [doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1592]