Towards an Integration of Speech and Natural Language Processing

Man-machine communication with natural language requires the integration of heterogeneous knowledges within a homogeneous framework. This problem concerns more particularly the speech/natural language interface. We propose in this paper an HPSG view of prosody illustrated with French intonation phenomena. We show that this linguistic theory is adapted for the integration representation: typed feature structures provide the homogenous knowledge representation framework and instantiation principles allow a precise representation of prosody/syntax relations. This paper presents a modiication of the phon feature structure of the signs together with some constraints and principles controling this prosody/syntax integration. Practically, we show that prosodic informations can help a parser in several ways: control (indications of units boundaries and indirectly on the government relations), dis-ambiguation (attachment heuristic) and pre-analysis (marks for particular contructions such as extraction, dislocation, etc.). We present in the last section a prosody-guided parser relying on this approach with some results.