Parsing With Clause and Intra-clausal Coordination Detection

We present a new dependency parsing algorithm based on the decomposition of large sentences into smaller units such as clauses and intraclausal coordinations. For the identification of these units, new methods combining machine learning techniques and heuristic rules were developed. The algorithm was evaluated on the Slovene dependency treebank text corpus. Compared to the MSTP parser, currently the most accurate for Slovene, parsing accuracy was improved by 1.27 percentage points, which equals 6.4 % relative error reduction

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Computational Approaches to the Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody to Improve Parsing

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing. Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected in a previous study were reanalyzed using native speaker judgment and automatic methods (forced alignment). Results demonstrate similar prosodic splitting behavior as in English in contradiction to the original study’s findings. Chapter 3 presents a number of studies examining whether syntactic ambiguity can yield different prosodic patterns, allowing humans and/or computers to resolve the ambiguity. In an experimental study, humans disambiguated sentences with prepositional phrase- (PP)-attachment ambiguity with 49% accuracy presented as text, and 63% presented as audio. Machine learning on the same data yielded an accuracy of 63-73%. A corpus study on the Switchboard corpus used both prosodic breaks and phrase lengths to predict the attachment, with an accuracy of 63.5% for PP-attachment sentences, and 71.2% for relative clause attachment. Chapter 4 aims to identify aspects of syntax that relate to prosody and use these in combination with prosodic cues to improve parsing. The aspects identified (dependency configurations) are based on dependency structure, reflecting the relative head location of two consecutive words, and are used as syntactic features in an ensemble system based on Recurrent Neural Networks, to score parse hypotheses and select the most likely parse for a given sentence. Using syntactic features alone, the system achieved an improvement of 1.1% absolute in Unlabelled Attachment Score (UAS) on the test set, above the best parser in the ensemble, while using syntactic features combined with prosodic features (pauses and normalized duration) led to a further improvement of 0.4% absolute. The results achieved demonstrate the relationship between syntax, syntactic phrase length, and prosody, and indicate the ability and future potential of prosody to resolve ambiguity and improve parsing

Prosodic Phrasing in Spontaneous Swedish

One of the most important functions of prosody is to divide the flow of speech into chunks. The chunking, or prosodic phrasing, of speech plays an important role in both the production and perception of speech. This study represents a move away from the laboratory speech examined in previous, related studies on prosodic phrasing in Swedish, since a spontaneous, Southern Swedish speech material is investigated. The study is, however, not primarily intended as a study of the Southern Swedish dialect; rather Southern Swedish is used as a convenient object on which to test various hypotheses about the phrasing function of prosody in spontaneous speech. The study comprises both analyses of production data and perception experiments, and both the phonetics and phonology of prosodic phrasing is dealt with. First, the distribution of prosodic phrase boundaries in spontaneous speech is examined by considering it as a reflection of optimality theoretic constraints that restrain the production and perception of speech. Secondly, the phonetic realization of prosodic phrase boundaries is investigated in a study on articulation rate changes within the prosodic phrase. Evidence of phrase-final lengthening, a reduction of the articulation rate in the final part of the prosodic phrase, is found. The tonal means used to signal coherence within the prosodic phrase is subsequently investigated. An attempt is made to test the two Lund intonation models’ capacities for describing spontaneous speech. The two approaches have different implications for the amount of preplanning needed, which makes them particularly interesting to compare by testing spontaneous data. The results indicate that no or little preplanning is needed to produce tonally coherent phrases. No evidence is found to suggest e.g. that speakers accommodate for the length of the upcoming phrase by starting longer phrases with a higher F0 than short phrases. An explanation is sought for variation in F0 starting points found in the data despite F0’s insensitivity to phrase length. It is concluded that F0 is used to signal coherence even across prosodic phrase boundaries. It is furthermore found that tonal coherence signals are used to override strong boundary signals in spontaneous speech, thereby making initially unplanned additions possible. Finally, the perception of boundary strength is examined in two perception experiments. Listeners are found to agree well in their perceptual judgments of boundary strength, and it is shown that the main correlate to perceived boundary strength in spontaneous speech is pause length. The useful distinction between weak, prosodic phrase boundaries and strong, prosodic utterance boundaries in descriptions of read speech is found to be inappropriate for descriptions of spontaneous speech. It fails to capture the conflicting local and global signals of boundary strength and coherence that arise when strong boundary signals are overriden by coherence signals. The possibility to use conflicting signals in this way is seen as an important asset to the speaker as it makes changes in the speech plan possible, and it is regarded to be a characteristic of prosodic phrasing in spontaneous speech

Grammatical Encoding for Speech Production

This Elements series presents theoretical and empirical studies in the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics. Topics include issues in the mental representation and processing of language in production and comprehension, and the relationship of psycholinguistics to other fields of research. Each Element is a high quality and up-to-date scholarly work in a compact, accessible format.Publisher PD

Coordinating in dialogue: Using compound contributions to join a party

PhDCompound contributions (CCs) – dialogue contributions that continue or complete an earlier contribution – are an important and common device conversational participants use to extend their own and each other’s turns. The organisation of these cross-turn structures is one of the defining characteristics of natural dialogue, and cross-person CCs provide the paradigm case of coordination in dialogue. This thesis combines corpus analysis, experiments and theoretical modelling to explore how CCs are used, their effects on coordination and implications for dialogue models. The syntactic and pragmatic distribution of CCs is mapped using corpora of ordinary and task-oriented dialogues. This indicates that the principal factors conditioning the distribution of CCs are pragmatic and that same- and cross-person CCs tend to occur in different contexts. In order to test the impact of CCs on other conversational participants, two experiments are presented. These systematically manipulate, for the first time, the occurrence of CCs in live dialogue using text-based communication. The results suggest that syntax does not directly constrain the interpretation of CCs, and the primary effect of a cross-person CC on third parties is to suggest to them a strong form of coordination or coalition has formed between the people producing the two parts of the CC. A third experiment explores the conditions under which people will produce a completion for a truncated turn. Manipulations of the structural and contextual predictability of the truncated turn show that while syntax provides a resource for the construction of a CC it does not place significant constraints on where the split point may occur. It also shows that people are more likely to produce continuations when they share common ground. An analysis using the Dynamic Syntax framework is proposed, which extends previous work to account for these findings, and limitations and further research possibilities are outlined

Active dependency completion in adults and children: Representations and adaptation

This dissertation investigates the effect of language experience on syntactic predictions during real time language processing, and how these predictions develop. In particular, it focuses on filler-gap dependency processing. A prominent psycholinguistic theory suggests that incremental processing decisions are governed by statistics derived from the distribution of structures in the input. Children are an ideal testing ground for this theory because they are still acquiring this distributional information. The first part of this dissertation examines children’s syntactic predictions during the real time comprehension of filler-gap dependencies. Though adults’ active association of the filler with the verb has been robustly demonstrated, visual world eye tracking data reveals that children do not actively complete the dependency at the verb. A probabilistic account of this finding would attribute it to differential experience with gap positions. A corpus analysis of the distribution of gap positions in the input to adults, child-directed speech, and children’s spontaneous utterances revealed that this was not the case; adults and children have similar experience with gap positions. The second part of this dissertation directly manipulates adults’ recent language experience to test predictions of the probabilistic parsing model. Two eye tracking during reading experiments revealed that exposure to an improbable gap position can decrease active gap filling at the verb, but it does not increase the likelihood of predicting this alternative structure. A third experiment suggests that these effects may be due to a task-specific processing strategy. The third part of this dissertation attempts to accelerate the development of active gap filling by manipulating the statistics in children’s input. This distribution is provided by a novel picture completion task designed to elicit wh-questions. Comprehension of concentrated filler-gap dependency input had no effect on children’s syntactic predictions, but production of a less probable gap position primed predictions for the more probable one. Finally, this dissertation critically evaluates the probabilistic parsing model in light of the experiments reported within and finds that statistical information does not reliably predict parsing behaviors. An alternative model is proposed that accounts for these findings and appeals on the representational requirement imposed by the filler-gap dependency structure

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)