Syntactic and Semantic Input to Prosodic Markup in CommandTalk
Elizabeth Owen Bratt, John Dowding · 2003
The CommandTalk military spoken dialogue system uses Semantic Head-Driven Generation in Gemini grammars, which have compositional semantics, permitting the iden-tification of parse tree nodes corresponding to logical form subexpressions. This method of generation gives the Com-mandTalk prosody agent access to appropriate syntactic and semantic information to provide markup on generated sen-tences so that specialized military terms are pronounced cor-rectly and so that general English language constructions important for dialogue can be given appropriate prosody to enhance their intelligibility and effectiveness. Specific mil-itary examples are map grid coordinates and unit call signs consisting of strings of letters and digits. The most salient English language construction supported is alternative ques-tions, with contrastive stress on the distinguishing parts of alternatives.