Endofutterance
Endofutterance is a boundary marker in discourse that signals the conclusion of an utterance by a speaker. In linguistics and computational linguistics, an utterance is the spoken or written unit that carries a complete thought or discourse function within a turn in conversation. The endofutterance boundary helps segment continuous speech into analyzable units and supports dialogue management, transcription, and language processing tasks. It is often discussed in the context of segmentation in spoken corpora and in the design of interactive systems.
In spoken language, endofutterance is realized through prosodic cues such as pause duration, an intonation fall,
In NLP and speech technologies, detecting endofutterance is essential for streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) segmentation,
Challenges include overlapping speech, interruptions, backchannels, rapid turn-taking, and noisy environments that complicate boundary detection. Cross-linguistic
See also: end of sentence, utterance boundary, boundary detection.