English

Prosodic features improve sentence segmentation and parsing

Computation and Language 2023-02-24 v1

Abstract

Parsing spoken dialogue presents challenges that parsing text does not, including a lack of clear sentence boundaries. We know from previous work that prosody helps in parsing single sentences (Tran et al. 2018), but we want to show the effect of prosody on parsing speech that isn't segmented into sentences. In experiments on the English Switchboard corpus, we find prosody helps our model both with parsing and with accurately identifying sentence boundaries. However, we find that the best-performing parser is not necessarily the parser that produces the best sentence segmentation performance. We suggest that the best parses instead come from modelling sentence boundaries jointly with other constituent boundaries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.12165,
  title  = {Prosodic features improve sentence segmentation and parsing},
  author = {Elizabeth Nielsen and Sharon Goldwater and Mark Steedman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.12165},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.12667

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:48:07.957Z