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<Paper uid="P90-1003">
  <Title>PROSODY, SYNTAX AND PARSING</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="19" end_page="20" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The sample of sentences used for this study is extremely small, and the principal test set used, the phonetically ambiguous sentences, is not independent of the set used to develop our system. We therefore do not want to make any exaggerated claims in interpreting our results. We believe though, that we have found a promising and novel approach for incorporating prosodic information into a natural language processing system. We have shown that some extremely common cases of syntactic ambiguity can be resolved with prosodic information, and that grammars can be modified to take advantage of prosodic information for improved parsing. We plan to test the algorithm for generating prosodic break indices on a larger set of sentences by more talkers. Changing from speech read by professional speakers to spontaneous speech from a variety of speakers will no doubt require modification of our system along several dimensions. The next steps in this research will include: * Investigating further the relationship between prosody and syntax, including the different roles of phrase breaks and prominences in marking syntactic structure,  * Improving the prosodic labeling algorithm by incorporating intonation and syntactic/semantic information, * Incorporating the automatically labeled information in the parser of the SRI Spoken Language System (Moore, Pereira and Murveit 1989), * Modeling the break indices statistically as a function of syntactic structure, * Speeding up the parser when using the prosodic information; the expectation is that pruning out syntactic hypotheses that are incompatible with the prosodic pattern observed can both improve accuracy and speed up the parser overall.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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