PCFGs with syntactic and prosodic indicators of speech repairs
John Hale, Matthew Snover, Robin S. Stewart, Izhak Shafran, Lisa Yung, Bonnie Jean Dorr, Mary P. Harper, Anna Krasnyanskaya, Matthew Lease, Yang Liu, Brian Roark · 2006
A grammatical method of combining two kinds of speech repair cues is presented. One cue, prosodic disjuncture, is detected by a decision tree-based ensemble classifier that uses acoustic cues to identify where normal prosody seems to be interrupted (Lickley, 1996). The other cue, syntactic parallelism, codifies the expectation that repairs continue a syntactic category that was left unfinished in the reparandum (Levelt, 1983). The two cues are combined in a Treebank PCFG whose states are split using a few simple tree transformations. Parsing performance on the Switchboard and Fisher corpora suggests that these two cues help to locate speech repairs in a synergistic way.