Classifying Cue Phrases in Text and Speech Using Machine Learning

Cue phrases may be used in a discourse sense to explicitly signal discourse structure, but also in a sen-tential sense to convey semantic rather than structural information. This paper explores the use of machine learning for classifying cue phrases as discourse or sen-tential. Two machine learning programs (cgrendel and C4.5) are used to induce classiication rules from sets of pre-classiied cue phrases and their features. Machine learning is shown to be an eeective technique for not only automating the generation of classiication rules, but also for improving upon previous results.