ISCA Archive - Utilising prosody to perform syntactic disambiguation (original) (raw)

Utilising prosody to perform syntactic disambiguation

Andrew Hunt

The syntactic andprosodic structures of spoken utterances are known to be related, although the relationship is difficult to define. This paper presents a novel method for modelling prosodic breaks from syntactic information obtained from an unconventional parser, the "Link Parser". The model is used to score candidate syntactic structures based on prosodic breaks. The technique obtains 88% accuracy in selecting an appropriate syntactic parse using hand labels, which compares well with 84% for human subjects.

Keywords: syntax, prosody, disambiguation