The analysis of spoken language is widely considered to be a more challenging task than the analysis of written text. All of the difficulties of written language can generally be found in spoken language as well. Parsing spontaneous speech must, however, also deal with problems such as speech disfluencies, the looser notion of grammaticality, and the lack of clearly marked sentence boundaries. ...

This paper investigates the impact of Constraint Dependency Grammars (CDG) on the accuracy of an integrated speech recognition and CDG parsing system. We compare a conventional CDG with CDGs that are induced from annotated sentences and template-expanded sentences. The grammars are evaluated on parsing speed, precision/coverage, and improvement of word and sentence accuracy of the integrated sy...

Mantauran is one of the six dialects of the Formosan language Rukai, spoken in the southcentral region of Taiwan. It is spoken by only 250–300 people and is highly endangered, with only a few elderly speakers still fluent. This alone is reason enough to document the language that in a generation or so will probably no longer be spoken. But Rukai is unique in that it apparently exhibits an accus...

The influence of standard Italian on the minor Romance languages spoken in Italy (i.e. the Italian dialects) permeates all aspects of their grammar. In this article, I provide an example of the way in which Italian prosody can affect dialects, a poorly studied type of influence. I show that a speaker may have a range of options available when speaking ‘dialect,’ including forms that are influen...

SRI is developing a multi-modal interface to an air travel database that will permit cooperative planning via interactive human-machine problem solving. The project goals are real-time, large vocabulary (3000 words), high semantic accuracy (90%), speaker-independent understanding of spontaneously spoken natural language in a restricted domain. The grammar should be shown to be habitable and the...

In this paper, we describe an approach to analysis for spoken language translation that combines phrase-level grammar-based parsing and automatic domain action classification. The job of the analyzer is to transform utterances into a shallow semantic task-oriented interlingua representation. The goal of our hybrid approach is to provide accurate real-time analyses and to improve robustness and ...

We describe the grammar induction system for Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) submitted to SemEval’14: Task 2. A statistical model is trained with a rich feature set and used for the selection of candidate rule fragments. Posterior probabilities produced by the fragment selection model are fused with estimates of phraselevel similarity based on lexical and contextual information. Domain and langua...

This paper describes and evaluates the automatic grammatical annotation of a chat and an e-mail corpus of together 117 million words, using a modular Constraint Grammar system. We discuss a number of genre-specific issues, such as emoticons and personal pronouns, and offer a linguistic comparison of the two corpora with corresponding annotations of the Europarl corpus and the spoken and written...