Using Discourse Predictions for Ambiguity Resolution

Abstract

In this paper we discuss how we apply discourse predictions along with non context-based predictions to the problem of parse disambiguation in Enthusiast, a Spanish-to-English translation system (Woszcyna et al., 1993; Suhm et al., 1994; Levin et al., 1995). We discuss extensions to our plan-based discourse processor in order to make this possible. We evaluate those extensions and demonstrate the advantage of exploiting context-based predictions over a purely non context-based approach. 1 Introduction A system which processes spoken language must address all of the ambiguities arising when processing written language, plus other ambiguities specific to the speech processing task. These include ambiguities derived from speech disfluencies, speech recognition errors, and the lack of clearly marked sentence boundaries. Because a large flexible grammar is necessary to handle these features of spoken language, as a side-effect the number of ambiguities increases. In this paper, we discuss ..