GEMINI: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding

Gemini is a natural language understanding system developed for spoken language applications. The paper describes the architecture of Gemini, paying particular attention to resolving the tension between robustness and overgeneration. Gemini features a broad-coverage unification-based grammar of English, fully interleaved syntactic and semantic processing in an all-paths, bottom-up parser, and an utterance-level parser to find interpretations of sentences that might not be analyzable as complete sentences. Gemini also includes novel components for recognizing and correcting grammatical disfluencies, and for doing parse preferences. This paper presents a component-by-component view of Gemini, providing detailed relevant measurements of size, efficiency, and performance.Comment: 8 pages, postscrip

Temporal markers of prosodic boundaries in children's speech production

It is often thought that the ability to use prosodic features accurately is mastered in early childhood. However, research to date has produced conflicting evidence, notably about the development of children's ability to mark prosodic boundaries. This paper investigates (i) whether, by the age of eight, children use temporal boundary features in their speech in a systematic way, and (ii) to what extent adult listeners are able to interpret their production accurately and unambiguously. The material consists of minimal pairs of utterances: one utterance includes a compound noun, in which there is no prosodic boundary after the first noun, e.g. ‘coffee-cake and tea’, while the other utterance includes simple nouns, separated by a prosodic boundary, e.g. ‘coffee, cake and tea’. Ten eight-year-old children took part, and their productions were rated by 23 adult listeners. Two phonetic exponents of prosodic boundaries were analysed: pause duration and phrase-final lengthening. The results suggest that, at the age of 8, there is considerable variability among children in their ability to mark phrase boundaries of the kind analysed in the experiment, with some children failing to differentiate between the members of the minimal pairs reliably. The differences between the children in their use of boundary features were reflected in the adults' perceptual judgements. Both temporal cues to prosodic boundaries significantly affected the perceptual ratings, with pause being a more salient determinant of ratings than phrase-final lengthening

Intonation contours and stress group patterns in declarative sentences of varying length in ASC Danish

Four subjects recorded eight non-compound declarative sentences, containing from one to eight stress groups. Acoustic analysis reveals a tendency for fundamental frequency range to increase with increased utterance length, but in a non-linear and seemingly random fashion. The increase is brought about by higher starting points as well as lower ending points in the longer utterances. Concomitant with the range increase we find a decrease in overall downdrift in the longer utterances, but degree of downdrift is not simply inversely related to utterance length. With four and more stress groups the intonation contour is decomposed into prosodic phrase groups, i.e. the contour contains discontinuities in the shape of partial resettings. The prosodic phrase group boundaries are determined by but do not exactly coincide with major syntactic boundaries, and the data present an argument in favour of a hypothesis of prosodic categories as distinct entities with a non-isomorphous relation to syntactic structure

Issues in the Phonology and Morphology of the Major Iberian Languages.

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Co-authorship of Joint utterances in Japanese

The paper introduces a type of joint utterance construction in Japanese, in which two independent sentential-level units are amalgamated, which has hitherto received little attention in the literature. Unlike traditional joint utterance construction where one speaker maintains authority over the syntactic structure of the forthcoming continuation and the other accedes to this, thereby constituting a single TCU (turn constructional unit), our examples demonstrate that both speakers can have authority over the syntactic design of joint utterances. We call such collaborative utterances ‘co-authored joint utterances’ in this paper.The uniqueness of co-authored joint utterances lies in their syntactic architecture. While syntactic and semantic continuity are successfully achieved in constructing co-authored joint utterances, they represent a co-joined structure in which two sentential-level units are involved with their shared part constituting a point of amalgamation, and because of this, the structure of a co-authored joint utterance can no longer be parsed with extant grammar.In analysing co-authored joint utterances, we examine how they can be treated in relation to the distinction between TCU (Turn Constructional Unit) continuation and new TCUs. Due to the particularities of the syntactic architecture of co-authored joint utterances, their existence raises questions about the way in which this distinction is currently operationalised, because despite being syntactically an incremental continuation, and so seemingly a TCU continuation, the co-authored joint utterance implements an action beyond what was initially instantiated by the antecedent of that joint utterance, and so arguably constitutes a new TCU