The use of relative duration in syntactic disambiguation (1990)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the Speech and Natural Language Workshop |
| Citations: | 15 - 3 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Ostendorf90theuse,
author = {M. Ostendorf and P. J. Prices and J. Bear and C. W. Wightmant},
title = {The use of relative duration in syntactic disambiguation},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the Speech and Natural Language Workshop},
year = {1990},
pages = {26--31},
publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann}
}
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Abstract
We describe the modification of a grammar to take ad-vantage of prosodic information automatically extracted from speech. The work includes (1) the development of an integer "break index " representation of prosodic phrase boundary information, (2) the automatic detec-tion of prosodic phrase breaks using a hidden Markov model on relative duration of phonetic segments, and (3) the integration of the prosodic phrase break informa-tion in SRI's Spoken Language System to rule out alter-native parses in otherwise syntactically ambiguous sen-tences. Initial experiments using ambiguous sentences read by radio announcers achieved good results in both detection and parsing. Automatically detected phrase break indices had a correlation greater than 0.86 with hand-labeled data for speaker-dependent models; and, in a subset of sentences with preposition ambiguities, the number of parses was reduced by 25 % with a simple grammar modification.
