Use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation
Colin W. Wightman, N. M. Veilleuz, Mari Ostendorf · 1991
Experiments have shown that prosody is used by human listeners to disambiguate spoken language and, in particular, that the relative size and location of prosodic phrase boundaries provides a cue for resolving syntactic ambiguity. Therefore, automatically detected prosodic phrase boundaries can provide information useful in speech understanding for choosing among several candidate parses. Here, we propose a scoring algorithm to rank candidate parses based on an analysis-by-synthesis method which compares the observed prosodic phrase structure with the predicted structure for each candidate parse. In experiments with a small corpus of ambiguous sentences spoken by FM radio announcers, we have achieved disambiguation performance close to the performance of human subjects in perceptual experiments.