how to find short pause in a sentence ?

can any1 help me with matlab code for finding pause in a sentence!!! for example in the sentence She was dancing,singing ,laughing in the party. Pauses are found after dancing,singing and laughing.how do i find it with matlab code pls help.

[Daniel Shub]

What is your definition of when a pause occurs?

[David Sanchez]

Do you mean blank spaces?

Answer 1

[Iain]

If you have the sentence as a string: eg.

 Str = 'She was dancing, singing, laughing in the party.';

You can get the index of each comma (which I think you mean by pause), with:

 pauses = find(Str == ',');

There are better ways, but that works.

[Sony]

Thanks lain,but i need to find short pauses in a sentence which does not have commas.for eg: hi im jain after hi there is a short pause but there is no comma to represent it. so how can i find these short pauses without using commas

[Iain]

How are you denoting a pause?

Are you dealing with recorded speech (audio)?

[Matt Kindig]

Sony,

What you are describing is broadly described as "natural language processing" and is a huge (and not-trivial) field of research. Figuring out a general algorithm to find pauses in a stream of text is not a simple matter at all. You'd be better off using an existing NLP toolbox rather than trying to figure out your own solution. This isn't my field, but a quick Google search brought up this: https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/2012/05/05/an-nlp-library-for-matlab/-- that might be a good place to start.

[Sony]

yes lain,im dealing with recorded speech there varieties of recorded speech normal fast and slow

[Iain]

Ok, in that case, if you threshold the audio stream, you should be able to find periods of below the threshold.

Pseudocode:

 Loud = this is when people are talking
 Quiet = this is when people are not talking
 Threshold = (Loud + Quiet) / 2
 Recorded_text = [Quiet Loud Quiet Loud Quiet Quiet Quiet Loud]
 Thresholded_text = Recorded_text > +Threshold & Recorded_text < -Threshold
 e.g.   Thresholded = [false true false true false false false true]

Each pause, no matter how small will be recorded as a stream of "false", and depending how the recording is performed, you'll find "false" in the middle of speech as well.