PCFGs with Syntactic and Prosodic Indicators of Speech Repairs

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACL
• Authors: John Hale, Izhak Shafran, Lisa Yung, Bonnie J. Dorr, Mary P. Harper, Anna Krasnyanskaya, Matthew Lease, Yang Liu, Brian Roark, Matthew G. Snover, Robin Stewart
• Keywords: ACL 2006, ACL 2007, Acoustic Cues, Speech Repair Cues, Tree-based Ensemble Classifier