tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "STRUCTURE AND INTONATION IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING*"

The structure imposed upon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogohal to their traditional surface-syntactic structure. However, the notion of "intonational structure" as formulated by Pierrehumbert, Selkirk, and others, can be subsumed under a rather different notion of syntactic surface structure that emerges from a theory of grammar based on a "Combinatory" extension to Categorial Gram, mar. Interpretations of constituents at this level are in tam directly related to "information structure", or discourse-related notions of "theme", "rheme", "focus" and "presupposition". . | STRUCTURE AND INTONATION IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING Mark Steedman Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania 200 South 33rd Street Philadelphia PA 19104-6389 steedman@ ABSTRACT The structure imposed upon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogonal to their traditional surface-syntactic structure. However the notion of intonatíonal structure as formulated by Pierrehumbert Selkirk and others can be subsumed under a rather different notion of syntactic surface structure that emerges from a theory of grammar based on a Combinatory extension to Categorial Grant-mar. Interpretations of constituents at this level are in turn directly related to information structure or discourse-related notions of theme rheme focus and presupposition . Some simplifications appear to follow for the problem of integrating syntax and other high-level modules in spoken language systems. One quite normal prosody b below for an answer to the following question a intuitively imposes the intonational structure indicated by the brackets stress marked in this case by raised pitch is indicated by capitals 1 a. I know that Alice prefers velvet But what does MAry prefer b MA-ry prefers CORduroy . Such a grouping is orthogonal to the traditional syntactic structure of the sentence. Intonational structure nevertheless remains strongly constrained by meaning. For example contours imposing bracketings like the following are not allowed 2 Three cats in ten prefer corduroy I am gratefill to Steven Bird Julia Hirschberg Aravind Joshi Mitch Marcus Janet Pierrehumbert and Bonnie Lynn Webber for comments and advice. They are not to blame for any errors in the translation of their advice into the present form. The research was supported by DARPA grant no. N0014-85-K001S and ARO grant no. DAAL03-89-COQ31. Halliday 6 observed that this constraint which Selkứk 14 has called the Sense Unit Condition seems to follow from the function of phrasal intonation which