Technical Reports (CIS)
Document Type
Technical Report
Date of this Version
April 1990
Abstract
The structure imposed upon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogonal to their traditional surface-syntactic structure. However, the notion of "intonational structure" as formulated by Pierrehumbert, Selkirk, and others, can be subsumed under a rather different notion of syntactic surface structure that emerges from a theory of grammar based on a "Combinatory" extension to Categorial Grammar. Interpretations of constituents at this level are in turn directly related to "information structures", or discourse-related notions of "theme", "rheme", "focus" and "presupposition". Some simplifications appear to follow for the problem of integrating syntax and other high-level modules in spoken language systems.
Recommended Citation
Mark Steedman, "Structure and Intonation in Spoken Language Understanding", . April 1990.
Date Posted: 21 August 2007
Comments
University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-90-23.