A Parser Coping With Self-Repaired Japanese Utterances And Large Corpus-Based Evaluation

Self-repair(Levelt 1988) is a repair of utterance by speaker him/herself. A truman speaker makes self-repairs very frequently in spontaneous speedt. (Blackmer and Mitton 1991) reported that self-repairs are made once every 4.8 seconds in dialogues taken fi'om radio talk shows. Self-repair is one ldnd of "permissible illformedness", that is a human listener can feel ill-formedness in it hut he/she is able to recognize its intended meaning. Thus your partner does not need to interrupt dialogue. Itow do you feel if your partner interrupts dialogue every 5 seconds to ask "What do you mean?" or so? You will give up dialogue or choose means of writing. Speaking without self-repair is the most difficult modality of natural language communication. The goal of our work is to make a dialogue system coping with self-repaired utterances. In this paper we propose a parser called SERUP(SElf-Repaired Utterance Parser), which plays a major part in understanding a self-repaired utterance. That is, because our approach is to translate a self-repaired utterance (Ex.1) into a wellformed version that does not contain selfrepair (Ex.2) and parse the well-formed one, we do not need to change the subsequent processes.