Intonation and the Intentional Structure of Discourse

It is increasingly recognized in Natural Language Processing that intonation makes a significant contribution to the communication of discourse structure. However, the correspondence between particular intonational features and specific aspects of discourse structure is only beginning to be understood. In this paper, we show how tune, phrasing, accent, and pitch range can combine to convey information about the nature of speaker intentions and about the relationship among those intentions. Our findings reveal new sources of linguistic information for research in plan inference and discourse understanding, and allow us to make more sophisticated use of intonational variation in synthetic speech.