tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "IDENTIFYING CUE PHRASES INTONATIONALLY"

Cue phrases are words and phrases such as now and by the way which m a y be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each m a y also be used to different effect. The question of h o w speakers and hearers distinguish between such uses of cue phrases has not been addressed in discourse studies to date. Based on a study of now in natural recorded discourse, we propose that cue and non-cue usage can be distinguished intonationally, on the basis of phrasing and. | NOW LET S TALK ABOUT NOW-. IDENTIFYING CUE PHRASES INTONATIONALLY Julia Hirschberg AT T Bell Laboratories Murray Hill New Jersey 07974 Diane Litman AT T Bell Laboratories Murray Hill New Jersey 07974 ABSTRACT Cue phrases are words and phrases such as now and by the way which may be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse. However while cue phrases may convey discourse structure each may also be used to different effect. The question of how speakers and hearers distinguish between such uses of cue phrases has not been addressed in discourse studies to date. Based on a study of now in natural recorded discourse we propose that cue and non-cue usage can be distinguished into-nationally on the basis of phrasing and accent. 1. Introduction Cue phrases are linguistic expressions -- such as okay but now anyway by the way in any case that reminds me which may instead of making a semantic contribution to an utterance . affecting its truth conditions be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse 4 16 5 .1 For example anyway can indicate a topic return and that reminds me can signal a digression. The recognition and generation of cue phrases is of considerable interest to research in natural language processing. The structural information conveyed by these phrases is crucial to tasks such as anaphora resolution 6 5 16 and the identification of rhetorical relations among portions of a text or discourse 11 8 16 . It has also been claimed that the incorporation of cue phrases into natural language processing systems helps reduce the complexity of discourse processing 21 4 10 . Despite the recognized importance of cue phrases many questions about how they are defined both individually and as a class and how they are to be represented generated and recognized - remain to be examined. For example in the general case each lexical item that can serve as a cue phrase also has an alternate While the cue .