tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "TOWARD TREATING ENGLISH NOMINALS CORRECTLY"

W e describe a program for assigning correct stress contours to nominals in English. It makes use of idiosyncratic knowledge about the stress behavior of various nominal types and general knowledge about English stress rules. W e have also investigated the related issue of parsing complex nominals in English. The importance of this work and related research to the problem of text-to-speech is 'discussed. | TOWARD TREATING ENGLISH NOMINALS CORRECTLY Richard w. Sproat Mark Y. Liberman Linguistics Department AT T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Avenue Murray Hill NJ 07974 Abstract We describe a program for assigning correct stress contours to nominals in English. It makes use of idiosyncratic knowledge about the stress behavior of various nominal types and general knowledge about English stress rules. We have also investigated the related issue of parsing complex nominate in English. The importance of this work and related research to the problem of text-to-speech is discussed. 1. Introduction We will discuss the analysis of English expressions consisting of a head noun preceded by one or more open-class specifiers rising prices horse blanket mushroom omelet banana bread parish priest gurgle detector quarterback sneak blind spot red herring bachelor s degree Planck s constant Madison Avenue Wall Street Washington s birthday sale error correction code logic steel industry collective bargaining agreement expensive toxic waste cleanup windshield wiper blade replacement computer communications network performance analysis primer and so forth. For brevity we will call such expressions nominals. Our main aim is an algorithm for assigning stress patterns to such nominal expressions we will also discuss methods for parsing them. Nominals are hard to parse since then pre-terminal string is usually consistent with all possible constituent structures so that we seem to need an analysis of the relative plausibility of the various meanings Marcus 1980 Finin 1980 . Even when the constituent structure is known as trivially in the case of binary nominals nominal stress patterns are hard to predict and also seem to depend on meaning Bolinger 1972 Fudge 1984 Selkứk 1984 . This is a serious problem for text-to-speech algorithms since nominal expressions are common at the ends of phrases and the location of a phrase s last accent has a large effect on its sound. Complex nominals are common